Faculty Profile: Professor Rod Ferguson

The aliveness of the liberal arts tradition and the emerging possibilities for interdisciplinary projects here at Yale make this place truly exciting for me. Having cut my teeth as a junior faculty member in the American Studies Department at the University of Minnesota, I learned to appreciate how the best of the liberal arts tradition—the promiscuity of intellectual dialogue and the breadth of intellectual literacy—can often be found through the research and teaching arising out of interdisciplinary programs, departments, and centers. So I’m delighted to become a member of the WGSS program at the moment where it’s growing intellectually and institutionally.

I’ve always thought of myself as someone who studies social formations. Hence, what can look like an eclectic set of publications on queer of color critique (Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique and One Dimensional Queer), critical university studies (The Reorder of Things: The University and its Pedagogies of Minority Difference and We Demand: The University and Student Protests), and most recently on black aesthetics (The Arts of Black Studies and The Bookshop of Black Queer Diaspora) are all ways for me to explore the intersectional complexity of our social worlds.

I fundamentally think of myself as a teacher and take great inspiration from the public school teachers that I had growing up. For me, they modeled the ways in which developing identities as a reader and a writer was one of the most demanding and thrilling exercises that a human being could undertake. Right now I’m teaching a queer social movements seminar and a black feminist theory seminar, and in each one I feel myself channeling my teachers by trying to impart to my students that to read and write carefully and deliberately about race, gender, sexuality, and class is to engage some of the most important issues of our age, and I count it my good fortune to be a teacher in this setting.