La Marr Bruce

Ph.D., 2013 (American Studies/ African American Studies), Yale University

An interdisciplinary humanities scholar, language artist, critical theorist, and Afromanticist, La Marr Jurelle Bruce earned his Ph.D. (2013) in African American Studies and American Studies from Yale University. His budding book project, “‘Inversions of the World’: Black Art Goes Mad,” considers a cohort of twentieth- and twenty-first-century African-American artists who have instrumentalized “madness” for radical art-making, self-making, and world-making. Proposing a theory of madness that addresses its floating signification—and engages its phenomenological, clinical, sociocultural, and political dimensions—he carefully confronts “the mad” in the work of writers Amiri Baraka, Adrienne Kennedy, Gayl Jones, and Ntozake Shange; jazz musicians Buddy Bolden and Charles Mingus; comedians Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle; legal theorist Patricia J. Williams; and hip hop musician Lauryn Hill. He is completing this project while serving as Lecturer in Theater Studies and Mellon Postdoctoral Associate in Interdisciplinary Studies at Yale University.

La Marr’s work is featured in African American Review (for which he received the 2014 Joe Weixlmann Award for Best Essay in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century African-American or Pan-African Literature and Culture) and forthcoming in Black Queer Studies 2.0 and TDR. He has presented at conventions of the American Studies Association, the Association for Theater in Higher Education, the Northeast Modern Language Association, and Performance Studies International. He has received grants and honors from the Beinecke Library at Yale University; the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia; the Fund for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale; the Social Science Research Council; and most recently, the Mellon Foundation. La Marr’s broader intellectual commitments are to twentieth-century African American literature; Afrodiasporic performance and popular culture; (black) feminist theory and criticism; (black) queer theory and criticism; race and psychoanalysis; and love as radical praxis.
 

Department: 
African American Studies/ American Studies