John Brooks

John Brooks (he/him) is an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Studies and the Department of Theatre, Film, and Media Arts at The Ohio State University. His research and teaching interests include Black creative expression from the 19th century to the present, radical and experimental aesthetics, performance studies, and projects of imagining and pursuing liberated Black futures. He is the author of The Racial Unfamiliar: Illegibility in Black Literature and Culture (Columbia University Press, Literature Now series, 2022). His current research puts process philosophy in conversation with discourses of Black futurity to theorize “rehearsal" as an expressive cultural practice of anticipation as enaction. His work has been supported by the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University and the Department of English at Indiana University.