Dr. Selamawit Terrefe, a professor at Tulane University has passed away, she was the 2022–2024 Williams College Faculty Fellow for their Mellon ‘Just Futures’ initiative and an African American literature and culture scholar in the English Department. In general, her research focuses on issues related to racial violence, particularly the apparent intractable nature of anti-Black violence, as a worldwide occurrence.
Global Black Studies, Critical Theory, Psychoanalysis, Gender and Sexuality, Continental Philosophy, and radical and revolutionary social movements are therefore among her areas of interest in both research and teaching. Terrefe, an interdisciplinary academic, examines hegemonic concepts of racial slavery as both the exclusive domain of the global North and a feature of the modern era, with the emergence of capital, challenging dominant theories of African diaspora, postcolonial melancholia, and violence.
Terrefe’s future study, conceived as a’semio(n)tics of Blackness,’ theorizes what she calls the ontics of Black maritime by focusing on the ontic entity of the slave-in-flight in contemporary discourses of global Black migration and Afro-futurist visual arts. Prior to joining Tulane, she was a postdoctoral scholar in Black Atlantic Studies at the University of Bremen’s English Speaking Cultures department.
