Faculty & Staff

Department Chairs

People

Chair

Omise'eke Tinsley

Department Chair and Professor

omiseeketinsley@blackstudies.ucsb.edu

Omise’eke Tinsley is Professor of Black Studies. Motivated by love for boundless black femme creativity, her research focuses on queer and feminist, Caribbean and African American performance and literature. She recently completed a manuscript entitled The Color Pynk: Black Femme-inist Love and Criticism, which explores black femme aesthetics of resistance in the Trump era. Earlier monographs include Beyoncé in Formation: Remixing Black Feminism (2018); Ezili’s Mirrors: Black Queer Genders and the Work of the Imagination (2018), winner of the 2019 Barbara Christian Prize in Caribbean Studies; and Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism Between Women in Caribbean Literature (2010). She has published articles in journals including GLQ, Feminist Studies, Yale French Studies, and Small Axe and is a contributor to Time, Ebony, The Advocate, and Huffington Post.

Keith Mayes

Vice Chair and Professor

Keith Mayes, Professor. Professor Mayes (Ph.D. in History, Princeton University) examines the narrative construction of reality and how African Americans have found ways to resist impositions of white meaning and emplotment. Mayes’ area of research is on post-war Black social movements but has expanded to include how white psychological, medical, and educational epistemologies invented and shaped narratives about the Black experience as an exercise in biopower. His latest book, The Unteachables: Disabilty Rights and the Invention of Black Special Education (2023) examines the discriminatory labeling of black students and their overrepresentation in classes for the intellectually disabled, emotional and behavior disordered, and learning disabled. Mayes is currently working on a follow-up, entitled, Clinical Badness: How the Behavioral Sciences Invented ‘Bad’ Black Behavior, looking at the history of anti-blackness in clinical medicine and how conceptions of school and societal disorders evolved into conduct disorders that helped construct the early versions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals.