Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman

Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman is Professor of American Studies and English at Brown University, affiliated with the Literature faculty in the English Department. Her areas of specialization include African American literature and culture, gender and sexuality studies, and visual culture and media studies. Abdur-Rahman's research addresses the interrelatedness of sexuality and social order in slave narratives and the impacts of Civil Rights retrenchment on black social organization and cultural output. She earned her PhD in 2005 and MA in 2003 from New York University, and her BA in 2000 from Stony Brook University. She joined Brown as an associate professor in 2018 and advanced to full professor.

Abdur-Rahman authored Against the Closet: Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Race (Duke University Press, 2012) and Millennial Style: The Politics of Experiment in Contemporary African Diasporic Culture (Duke University Press, 2024). Her essays appear in African American Review—for which she received the Darwin Turner Award for Best Essay of the Year twice—American Literary History, GLQ, The Faulkner Journal, The Black Scholar, and The James Baldwin Review. Contributions to edited collections include Faulkner and Whiteness, The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin, and The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative. She holds fellowships from the Ford Foundation, American Association of University Women, Woodrow Wilson Foundation, Mellon Foundation, W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University, Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin, and JFK Institute at Freie Universität Berlin. As a scholar-activist, she contributes commentary to The Feminist Wire and A-Line: A Journal of Progressive Thought. Her teaching encompasses courses such as Contemporary Narratives of US Slavery, Black Feminism: Roots, Routes, Futures, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, The Black Aesthetic, and Pembroke Research Seminars on the afterlives of ruin.

Professional Email: aliyyah_abdur-rahman@brown.edu