Roderick A. Ferguson is the William Robertson Coe professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, professor of American Studies, and the chair of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. He received his B.A. from Howard University and his Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego. An interdisciplinary scholar, his work traverses such fields as American studies, gender studies, queer studies, cultural studies, African American studies, sociology, literature, and education.
Ferguson is the author of One-Dimensional Queer (Polity, 2019), We Demand: The University and Student Protests (University of California, 2017), The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (University of Minnesota, 2012), and Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (University of Minnesota, 2004). He is the co-editor with Grace Hong of the anthology Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (Duke University, 2011). He is also co-editor with Erica Edwards and Jeffrey Ogbar of Keywords of African American Studies (NYU, 2018). He is currently working on two monographs—In View of the Tradition: Art and Black Radicalism and The Bookshop of Black Queer Diaspora. Ferguson is the 2020 recipient of the Kessler Award from the Center for LGBTQ Studies.
Ferguson’s teaching interests include queer of color critique, women of color feminism, critical ethnic studies, critical university studies, LGBTQ+ social movements, as well as classical and contemporary social theory.