Dr. Bedour Alagraa is Assistant professor of Political and Social Thought in the Department of African and African diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her PhD from the department of Africana Studies at Brown University in the Spring of 2019, and was an Andrew W. Mellon Graduate Fellow during her time at Brown. She also holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Toronto, and a Masters in Race, Ethnicity, and Post-Colonial Studies from the London School of Economics.
Her book manuscript is entitled The Interminable Catastrophe: Fatal Liberalisms, Plantation Logics, and Black Political Life in the Wake of Disaster, and charts a conceptual history of catastrophe as a political category/concept (rather than Event), via its inauguration in early modern natural science and empiricist debates, and subsequent crystallization as a concept on the plantation.
More broadly, Bedour is interested in Black radical genealogies in political theory, focusing on Caribbean thought, African anti-colonial thought, and Black Marxism(s) (among other topics). Bedour has also studied and written extensively on the works of Cedric Robinson and Sylvia Wynter, and is a member of the editorial team currently working on Wynter’s forthcoming monograph, Black Metamorphosis. Bedour is also currently working on an edited volume of Chairman Fred Hampton’s Speeches alongside Chairman Fred Hampton Jr., titled I Am a Revolutionary!: Speeches by Chairman Fred Hampton, forthcoming from Pluto Press in the fall of 2022.
She has been published in several journals, including Critical Ethnic Studies, Contemporary Political Theory, The CLR James Journal of Caribbean Philosophy, Small Axe, and Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society. She is currently co-editor, alongside Anthony Bogues, of the ‘Black Critique’ book series at Pluto Press.