Will Mosley
Assistant Professor, The Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Will Mosley (he/they) is an Assistant Professor in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is a cultural critic who specializes in Black cultural studies, Black queer theory, and feminist theories of tenderness. In addition, he works in the fields of affect studies, critical HIV studies, medical humanities, poststructuralism, and social movement theory.
Dr. Mosley has work featured or forthcoming in Feminist Theory, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Archeion: Journal of Queer Archives, Black Perspectives, The African American National Biography, NANO: New American Notes Online, Black Revelry: In Honor of The Sugar Shack, and E3W Review of Books. His research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University, the African American Intellectual History Society, the Humanities Institute at Wake Forest University, and the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies at UT-Austin.
Winner of the 2017 Lora Romero Memorial Award for Research in Race, Ethnicity and Gender from the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies at the UT-Austin, the scope of Dr. Mosley’s work is captured in their current book project, tentatively titled Tenderness: The Work of Black Queer Expression. Tenderness examines notions of tenderness, their relationship to hegemony, and their impact across culture, history, and in the national imaginary. In addition, Tenderness shows how Black queer expressive culture—in literature, music, podcasts, and visual cultures—can disrupt exclusionary definitions of tenderness in favor of radically inclusive alternatives.
He received his B.A. in English from Amherst College and a PhD in African and African Diaspora Studies with a Graduate Portfolio in LGBTQ Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. Before arriving to the University of Maryland, he held a professorship at Wake Forest University.
For more information, visit Dr. Mosley's faculty page.