Alix ChapmanAssistant Professor of African American Studies

Alix Chapman is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Emory University. He received his BS from Washington State University and his MA and PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. He teaches courses on sexuality and gender in the African Diasporic, Black Queer Studies, as well as courses on black radical aesthetics in music and performance. 

Chapman’s manuscript in progress is entitled Raising the Bottom: New Orleans, Sissy Bounce, and the afterlife of Katrina. Bounce music is a form of hip hop that emerged in New Orleans public housing projects in the 1990s. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and mass displacement of Black New Orleans, queer performers, locally referred to as sissies, became prominent recording artists and icons of hope.

His most recent peer-reviewed article, “Limbologics: The Black Queer Art of Uncertainty,”  appears in liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies (April 2023). This essay argues that limbo is a chronic aspect of Black queer life and thus the tools this community has developed in responding to these experiences might offer solutions for dealing with the acceleration of disaster in the twenty‐first century.

As a former professor of Women's Studies at Spelman College, Chapman held the first tenure track appointment dedicated to Black Queer Studies at a historically Black college or university and helped fashion the first trans inclusive admissions policy at an HBCU. Chapman has contributed to numerous transnational anti-war and anti-global capitalist demonstrations as a musician and performance artist.