Brandon Callender
Assistant Professor of English and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Brandeis University
Brandon Callender received his Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley in 2020. He is currently an Assistant Professor of English and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University, where he teaches courses as varied as The Ghosts of Race, Vampires: Dark Fictions of Blood, Black Queer Literatures, and Black Joy. His writing, teaching, and research explore the intersections of black, queer, and horror studies. Callender is also a board game fanatic, dedicated to thinking about how race, sexuality, and horror play together at the table.
Callender has appeared as an expert guest on NPR’s 1A to discuss “How Horror Creates Meaning” and has served as a recurring discussant at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His essays have appeared in Black Gay Genius: Answering Joseph’s Beam’s Call, The Bigness of Things: New Narrative & Visual Culture, Qui Parle, and the Bloomsbury Handbook to Black Queer Writing & Cultural Expression (forthcoming). His forthcoming book, Getting Behind in Black Gay Men's Literatures, is under contract with The Ohio State University Press. Getting Behind argues for the importance of eccentric desires in the formation of black gay male literary publics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries by considering how minor fixations shape collective experiences of collectivity, belonging, and progress.