Campus
- Downtown Toronto (St. George)
Fields of Study
- African American Literature
- American Literature
- Critical Race Studies
- Gender and Sexuality Studies
- Literary and Critical Theory
- Poetry and Poetics
- Twentieth-Century and Contemporary Literature
Areas of Interest
- Affect
- Music
- Psychoanalysis
- Sound Studies
Biography
I. Augustus Durham is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto. A former President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in English at the University of Maryland, College Park, he worked in New York prior to his arrival at Toronto. His research interests span numerous centuries to account for the emergence, presence, and meaning of blackness in modernity. Durham’s first monograph, Stay Black and Die: On Melancholy and Genius (Duke University Press), takes up such ideas to examine the relationship between black mothers and sons whereby through abstraction, the black feminine/maternal maintains a psychoanalytic and affective role in the making of melancholy and genius in the black masculine. He has published work in Syndicate, Black Camera: An International Film Journal, Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International, and Journal of Religion and Health; and an essay on the film Moonlight for an edited collection on Tarell Alvin McCraney. Durham is currently working on three new projects regarding a singer, a calendar year, and (re)invention.
Publications
Book
Stay Black and Die: On Melancholy and Genius (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023)
Articles and Essays
“C. Sharpe Grammar or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Wake.” Syndicate. 21 June 2022.
“‘Certainly no clamor for a kiss.’: When Black Men Touch.” In Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration, edited by Sharrell Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Wooden, 99-111. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2020.
“U, (New) Black(?) Maybe: Nostalgia and Amnesia in Dope.” Black Camera: An International Film Journal 8, no. 2 (Spring 2017): 165-182.
“A Loving Reclamation of the Unutterable: Patricia Hill Collins, Hortense J. Spillers, and Nina Simone as Excellent Performers of Nomenclature.” Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International 2, no. 1 (2013): 28-46.
“Richard Pryor: Melancholy and the Religion of Tragicomedy.” Journal of Religion and Health 50, no. 1 (2011): 132-144.