Robert Reid Pharr

Early life and education

A native North Carolinian, Reid-Pharr holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as well as a Ph.D. from Yale University's American Studies Program. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Career

In 2016 he was named a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and Matthiessen Visiting Professor of Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University. His essays have appeared in, among other places, Callaloo, Social Text, Transition, Studies in the Novel, Women and Performance, African American Review, American Literary History, Fuse, AfterImage, Radical America, American Literature, Feminist Formations, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Art in America. He has been a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Bogliasco Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2015 he was inducted into the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars.

Reid-Pharr has taught at the Johns Hopkins University, the University of Chicago, the University of Oregon, the University of Oxford, the American University of Beirut, Swarthmore College, and the College of William and Mary. His collection of essays Black Gay Man won the 2002 Randy Shilts Award for Best Gay Non-fiction given by the Publishing Triangle. His book Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. He is also the author of Conjugal Union:The Body, the House, and the Black American (Oxford University Press, 1999); and Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique (NYU 2016).

He is considered a "queer public intellectual" who "attempts to write noncompliance with heteronormativity, and affirmation of other ways of being, into existence"