Aaron Kamugisha

Ruth J. Simmons Professor of Africana Studies; Chair of the Department at Smith College

About

Aaron Kamugisha is a scholar of the social, political and cultural thought of the African diaspora. He holds a doctorate in social and political thought from York University and was the 2007–08 postdoctoral fellow in African American studies at Northwestern University. He taught at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus from 2006-2021 and in 2021 joined Smith College as the inaugural Ruth Simmons Professor in Africana Studies. He serves on the editorial boards of the following journals: Small Axe: A Journal of Caribbean Criticism, Social and Economic Studies, The Journal of West Indian Literature and The Caribbean Studies Association Journal. He is also the co-executive director of the Race and Resistance book series with Peter Lang Publishers, and an inaugural member of the Other Universals transnational research collective.

His primary intellectual and research interests encompass the intellectual history and the social, political and cultural thought of the African diaspora. His latest book, Beyond Coloniality: Citizenship and Freedom in the Caribbean Intellectual Freedom was published by Indiana University Press, with a simultaneous edition by University of Witwatersrand Press in March 2019. His latest edited collection is (co-edited with Victoria Collis-Buthelezi) The Caribbean Race Reader: From Colonialism to Anticolonial Thought (Polity Press, 2024). He is also the editor of seven other edited collections on Caribbean and Africana thought, including Caribbean Political Thought: The Colonial State to Caribbean Internationalisms (2013); Caribbean Political Thought: Theories of the Post-Colonial State (2013); (with Yanique Hume) Caribbean Cultural Thought: From Plantation to Diaspora 2013) and Caribbean Popular Culture: Power, Politics and Performance (2016); and (along with 14 other editors) The Routledge Reader in African American Rhetoric: The Long Duree of Black Voices (2018). He has also edited special issues of seven journals, including: (with Alissa Trotz) a special issue of Race & Class (October 2007); “Caribbean Trajectories: 200 Years On” to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the British abolishment of the slave trade; (with Peter Hudson) The C.L.R. James Journal special issue on Black Canadian Thought (Fall 2014); Small Axe 49 (March 2016) on Sylvia Wynter’s Black Metamorphosis; (with Jane Gordon, Lewis Gordon and Neil Roberts) The Antigua and Barbuda Review of Books (Summer 2017); Small Axe 64 (March 2021) on Caribbean intellectual history; and Small Axe 67 (March 2022) “Homage to Kamau Brathwaite”. Kamugisha’s teaching includes courses on Africana social and political thought, Caribbean studies, intellectual history and Caribbean cultural thought.