William Mosley
Will Mosley
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.
Articles
Ecstatic loneliness: black genders and the politics of affect in Mykki Blanco's ‘Loner’
The rapper Mykki Blanco is lauded as a trailblazer in the contemporary queer hip hop movement, and it is this reputation that, in part, makes the single of her debut album so curious. The song ‘Loner’ is unequivocally pop and explores health, loneliness, love and sex, echoing Blanco's shifting relationship to gender, genre, sobriety and serostatus. Amidst three key performances of this song, Blanco's consciousness was at various stages of development and they reflect her journey into trans womanhood and through HIV seroconversion. As such, her relationship to gender and disability comes in and out of focus as the legibility of her art and affect jockey across black gay, gender fluid and trans modes of self-determination. This confluence of Blanco's affect, genders, music and performances leads to certain questions. What constellates loneliness during a black trans process of becoming? What collateral genealogies and intellectual and expressive cultural formations come to bear on the affective attachments of black queer, trans, feminist art? In this article, I offer an account of the antagonistic relationship between (white) affect studies and black studies in order to contextualise the stakes of thinking affect alongside gender and race. I also forward a theory of ecstatic loneliness which attends to the ways in which anti-blackness, HIV stigma and transphobia produce negative affects that function as the basis for imagining a trans-inclusive care practice that is empathetic to the experience of seroconversion. Through analysis of three performances of ‘Loner’, I find that wayward commitments to gender lead to various emplacements of the song in black cisgender, transgender and gender-fluid discourses of affect, community and performance, resulting in an interdisciplinary method of black and queer self-making that is underexamined in affect studies scholarship.
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“How To Stand Out as a Primary Color; or, When I Saw Shango, Yemaya, and Oshun Dancing at The Sugar Shack
Will Mosley's work was published in the book Black Revelry: In Honor of ‘The Sugar Shack’.
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Stay away from those Winston boys': HIV and the Black Church in North Carolina’s Triad
Dr. Will Mosley was published in Archeion: Journal of Queer Archive.
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Teaching HIV and Black Queer Studies During Crisis
Mosley's article was published in the African American Intellectual History Society's Black Perspectives.
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Will Mosley Published in New American Notes Journal
Will Mosley's article was published in the New American Notes journal.
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Introduction: Security, Precarity, Surveillance
Will Mosley's article was published in E3WReview of Books.