Naomi Pabst

Naomi Pabst, Ph.D., History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2000, is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and American Studies. Her teaching and research focuses on the diversity among African Americans and on the complexities of black individual and collective identity. She is currently completing a manuscript that spotlights “unusual” or “unexpected” black experiences while also examining black cultural politics and the vicissitudes of African American life. Taking a humanities approach, Pabst’s research draws from black diasporic literature, cultural studies, critical theory, feminist theory, critical mixed race studies, and transnational studies. Navigating these fields, her scholarly work examines the boundaries of blackness with an eye to who winds up on the margins, and which black subjectivities are considered at once “black” and yet “not really black.” Pabst has published on these topics in various journals and anthologies and is sought after as an invited lecturer. Previously she spent two years teaching and doing research at Harvard as a Woodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities.