Garry Bertholf is an assistant professor in the Department of African American Studies at Wesleyan University. His research and teaching focus on Africana literature and literary criticism, critical theory, and Black intellectual history. His work, which was recently supported by a residential faculty fellowship in Wesleyan’s College of the Environment Think Tank on “Agency,” has appeared in numerous publications, most recently in the Nation Divided series at the University of Virginia Press and the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha series at the University Press of Mississippi—and his recent contribution to the study of the American Essay is forthcoming in the Modern Language Association’s Options for Teaching series. In addition to the COE Think Tank fellowship mentioned above, Professor Bertholf’s current book project (tentatively titled “The Black Charismatic: Demagoguery and the Politics of Affect”) has been supported by a residential faculty fellowship at Wesleyan’s Center for the Humanities, where he currently serves on the advisory board, and by the Provost Fellowship (also at Wesleyan). He is the current faculty advisor and founding director of Wesleyan’s Africana Research Collective and the former founding co-director of Wesleyan’s Africana Studies Colloquium Series. During the Spring 2025 semester, Professor Bertholf was elected to serve as the Social and Behavioral Sciences tenure-track faculty representative to Wesleyan’s Academic Council.

 

Before joining the faculty at Wesleyan, Professor Bertholf was an Andrew W. Mellon Visiting Faculty Fellow in the Humanities Unbounded Initiative at Duke University and an assistant professor of English and Africana Studies at Davidson College, where he was elected to honorary membership in the Omicron Delta Kappa Honor Society by the Delta Circle’s graduating class of 2019. Prior to that he was an assistant professor of Digital Rhetorics, Comparative Media, and Civic Culture in the Department of English at Clemson University, where he received the Award of Distinction from the National Scholars Program’s graduating class of 2017 as well as the 2015-2016 Faculty Member of the Year Award from the former College of Architecture, Arts, and Humanities.

 

Professor Bertholf was trained at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was the first recipient of the Ph.D. in Africana Studies and the inaugural postdoctoral fellow of the Program on Race, Science, and Society; he was also an associate scholar of the Penn Humanities Forum (now Wolf Humanities Center) on “Violence,” and a lecturer of cultural studies and criticism in the Critical Writing Program of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing. In addition, he has held previous appointments as a visiting assistant professor of Africana Studies in the former Department of History and Politics at Drexel University and as a preceptor for Cornel West in the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University. He has organized several academic symposia and colloquia, ranging in theme from “The Future of Hip-Hop” (2010) and “The Future of Race and Science” (2014) to “Slavery, Violence, and the Archive” (2019) and “Black Feminist Ecologies” (2021). Together with the students in his “Black Literary Theory” course, he organized a hybrid salon on “The Future of Black Studies” (2022). 

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This semester Professor Bertholf is teaching an undergraduate seminar on the major works of Saidiya Hartman.