The final guest of the History of Consciousness Spring 2026 Research Colloquium will be joining us next Monday, May 11th. This event brings Alexander Ghedi Weheliye to give their talk “Schwarz-Sein: Elements of Black Life”.

Schwarz-Sein: Elements of Black Life establishes the different ways Blackness operates as the ontological mattering of ungendering. This allows me to conceptualize Blackness as integral to being as such and imagine how its compound manifestations matter and reverberate both through and beyond the category of the human.

Join us in-person or register to attend virtually.

Alexander Ghedi Weheliye is a writer, professor, and curator focusing on Black Studies, critical theory, gender and sexuality studies, social technologies, and popular culture. They are Malcolm S. Forbes Professor in the Department of Modern Culture and Media and the Brown Arts Institute at Brown University. They are the author of Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (2005), Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (2014), and Feenin: R&B Music and the Materiality of BlackFem Voices and Technology (2023). Currently, Weheliye is working on two projects. The first, Between Continents, is a critical memoir about their early life in East Germany and Somalia. The second, Schwarz-Sein: Elements of Black Life, reimagines the periodic table of elements from the vantage point of Black queer life. They are co-curator of the group exhibition, Exposure: Black Queer Visual Constellations at Cohen Gallery, Brown University (April-June 2026).