Amir Curry (He/They)Ph.D. Student (2023 Cohort)

Amir Curry is a doctoral candidate in African American Studies at Emory University. He earned a B.A. in Social Relations with a concentration in American Political Studies from the oldest HBCU, Cheyney University of Pennsylvania. He is also a Centennial Scholar and earned an M.A. in African American Studies from Emory University. 

His research grapples with Black aesthetics, diasporic expressive culture, psychoanalysis, and theories of Black negativity, in efforts to complicate normative understandings of historical trauma and cultural sovereignty. Examining slavery as a recursive regime that troubles the cultural terrain of blackness, Amir deciphers cultural enactments of conviviality and their attendant imaginaries of freedom in the African diaspora as a psycho-social symptomology of slavery.

Amir is currently working on his dissertation, “Plantation Desire: Crop Over and the Afterlife of Slavery in Barbados.”