GerShun Avilez

Notable work and positions

University of Minnesota, College of Liberal Arts - Dean; Russell M. and Elizabeth M. Bennett Chair in the Liberal Arts; Professor of English
University of Maryland, College Park - Professor of English; Associate Dean for Academic Affairs (prior roles)
Yale University; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill - Faculty positions (prior roles)

Biography

GerShun Avilez is a cultural studies scholar and dean of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota, where he also holds the Russell M. and Elizabeth M. Bennett Chair in the Liberal Arts and is a professor of English. He earned a BA from Hendrix College, an MA in English from Temple University, and a PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania in 2009. He held a postdoctoral teaching fellowship at the Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African American Studies at the University of Rochester, was an assistant professor of English and African American Studies at Yale University from 2013 to 2016, and then joined the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as an associate professor of English and director of its Program in Sexuality Studies. He later served as a professor of English and associate dean for academic affairs at the University of Maryland, College Park, before being named dean of the University of Minnesota's College of Liberal Arts, where he leads the school's Compass 2030 strategic plan. Avilez specializes in contemporary African American and Black diasporic literatures and visual cultures, with scholarship examining how gender and sexuality inform artistic production. He is the author of Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism (2016), winner of the Modern Language Association's William Sanders Scarborough Prize, and Black Queer Freedom: Spaces of Injury and Paths of Desire (2020), and is a co-editor of The Norton Anthology of American Literature: 1945-Present.

Career highlights

• William Sanders Scarborough Prize 2017 · Awarded by the Modern Language Association for Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism, recognizing outstanding scholarship on Black American literature or culture.
• The Norton Anthology of American Literature: 1945-Present · Co-edited this widely used collection of American literary works.