La Marr Jurelle Bruce
Associate Professor, American Studies
Affiliate Faculty, English
Affiliate Faculty, School of Music
Affiliate Faculty, School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies
Affiliate Faculty, The Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Affiliate Faculty, Department of African American and Africana Studies
(301) 405-1356ljbruce@umd.edu
2324 Tawes Hall
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Research Expertise
African American/African Diaspora
Black Studies
Disability
Everyday Life
Literary Theory
Popular Culture
Queer Theory
Race/Ethnicity
La Marr Jurelle Bruce (B.A. Columbia, Ph.D. Yale) is a philosopher, fever dreamer, interdisciplinary humanities scholar, literary and cultural critic, first-generation college graduate, and Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. His scholarship centers B/black expressive cultures—spanning literature, film, music, theatre, and the art and aesthetics of quotidian black life. A Ford Foundation Fellow and Mellon-Mays Fellow, he also studies and teaches popular culture, performance theory, queer theory, disability studies, and psychoanalysis.
Winner of the Joe Weixlmann Essay Prize from African American Review, Dr. Bruce’s writing is also featured or forthcoming in American Quarterly, The Black Scholar, GLQ, Social Text, TDR, and several anthologies. Dr. Bruce’s research has been supported by fellowships from the Beinecke Library at Yale University, the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia, the Ford Foundation, the Fund for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale University, the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Stanford University Humanities Center.
His book, How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity (Duke University Press 2021), earned the MLA Prize for a First Book from the Modern Language Association and the Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association. Now he’s in the thick of two projects. One is a study of—and an experiment in—convergences of love and madness. The other unfurls a critical theory and cultural history of black love outside.
Dr. Bruce will be on research leave at the Stanford University Humanities Center for the 2024–2025 academic year.