La Marr Jurelle Bruce earned his BA in African American Studies and English & Comparative Literature from Columbia University and his PhD in African American Studies and American Studies from Yale University. An interdisciplinary humanities scholar, Dr. Bruce is appointed in the Department of American Studies and affiliated with the Departments of African American Studies, Theatre and Performance Studies, and Women’s Studies at UMD. His areas of interest and expertise include Africana literature and performance, US popular culture, queer theory, psychoanalysis, mad studies, and especially the art and aesthetics of quotidian black life.

Winner of the 2014 Joe Weixlmann Award from African American Review, he has also published work in American Quarterly, The Black Scholar, GLQ, Social Text, TDR, and elsewhere. His first book, How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity (forthcoming from Duke University Press), is a study of black artists who mobilize madness in radical literature and performance. His second project, The Afromantic, will generate a cultural history, critical theory, and existential expression of black joy and love amid antiblackness.