Tavia Nyong’o

Tavia Nyong’o is Associate Professor in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. He graduated in Social Studies at Wesleyan University, and later obtained his Doctoral degree in American Studies at Yale University. Professor Nyong’o is a cultural historian with a focus on racial formation in the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries. He has taught courses on black performance, on the history of the body, and on subcultural performance. He has lectured extensively in the United States and abroad, and has published reviews and essays in Social Text, Theatre Journal, GLQ, TDR, and Women and Performance. His book, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (University of Minnesota Press 2009), investigates musical, aesthetic, and political practices that conjoined blackness and whiteness in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Professor Nyong’o’s fellowships and honors include the Marshall Scholarship; the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship; the Ford Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship; the Graduate Fellow from the Center for Humanities at Wesleyan; and the Graduate Fellow from the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University.