Alix ChapmanAssistant Professor of African American Studies
Alix Chapman is an interdisciplinary scholar of music and performance in the United States and the African Diaspora. His research and teaching interests include Black Queer Studies, Black feminism, and anthropology. He holds a BS from Washington State University and an MA and PhD from the University of Texas at Austin.
Professor Chapman is the author of Raising the Bottom: Bounce Music and Black Queer Performance in Post-Katrina New Orleans, published by Duke University Press (April 2026). In the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent mass displacement of Black neighborhoods in New Orleans, Black queer performers redefined notions of belonging throughout the city. These unlikely figures—such as artists Big Freedia and Vockah Redu—played a significant role in calling the displaced back home and serving as beacons of hope. In Raising the Bottom, Chapman engages in performance ethnography, taking to the stage while writing about the lives of these bounce artists and their extended community.
His forthcoming article, “Finding the Funk: Sonic Experiments in Freedom,” is a memoir-based autoethnography of protest performance within the alter-globalization movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s, focusing on participation in the musical activist collective the Infernal Noise Brigade. Drawing on the methodological frameworks of performance ethnography, he argues that collective musical performance can function as both political intervention and ethnographic knowledge production. Through personal narrative, the piece reflects on street demonstrations as sites of improvisational choreography where sound, movement, and collective rhythm transform public space into a temporary autonomous zone (Bey 1991). In these moments, protest becomes not only spectacle but also a mode of relational knowledge generated through the body.
Professor Chapman is the recipient of multiple fellowships and awards. These honors include the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Department of Black Studies Dissertation Fellowship; New York University’s Faculty Resource Network Scholar-in-Residence Program and Winter Network Seminar; Duke University’s Summer Institute on Tenure and Professional Advancement; Emory University’s James Weldon Johnson Visiting Fellows Program; and the All-Black Emory Faculty Excellence Award.
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 develop the first trans-inclusive admissions policy at an HBCU.
PUBLICATIONS
Books
Raising the Bottom: Bounce Music and Black Queer Performance in Post-Katrina New Orleans. Durham: Duke University Press, 2026.
Book Chapters
Chapman, Alix, et al. Navigating Souths: Transdisciplinary Explorations of a U.S. Region. University of Georgia Press, 2017.
Journal Articles
Chapman, Alix. “The Punk Show: Queering Heritage in the Black Diaspora.” Cultural Dynamics 26, no. 3 (2014): 327–345.
Chapman, Alix. “Limbologics: The Black Queer Art of Uncertainty.” liquid blackness 7, no. 1 (2023): 62–75.
Chapman, Alix. “Passing the Mic: Black/Queer/Femme Poetics in New Orleans Bounce Music.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory (2025): 1–16.
