Ph.D. in History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2017

M.A. in  Social & Political Thought, York University, 2007

B.A. in English, York University, 2005

Read Dr. Gray's most recent publication: "Facing Emmett in the New Nadir" Critical Ethnic Studies 7:1 (Spring 2021)

Office Hours Sign-up: Fridays 1-3pm, 15-minute appointment or 30-minute appointment. 

Dr. Erin Gray is a post-disciplinary cultural historian and political theorist focusing on the relationship between politics, aesthetics, and critical theory. Her research interests include political violence and left counter-histories of genocide; visual and performance studies; aesthetics and experimental poetics; gender studies and feminist epistemology; critical race studies; the black radical tradition and critiques of racial capitalism; historiography and history from below; affect, sentiment, sensation, and biopolitics.

Erin’s research is presently focused on gendered racial formations within the photographic history of global white supremacy. Her current book project, In the Offing: Law-Founding Violence and the Moving Image of Lynching, engages the circulation of lynching’s material, discursive, and affective remains throughout the long photographic century (roughly 1839 to the present) to contest narratives of U.S. lynching culture’s post-civil rights demise. Recuperating radical left articulations of legal lynching as a form of class warfare, the book theorizes lynching photographs as moving images that illuminate the constitutive relationship of racial terror to global capitalism. 

Prior to her appointment at UC Davis, Erin taught in the department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University as a Provost postdoctoral fellow. From 2017-2018, Erin was a University of California President’s postdoctoral fellow in African American Studies at UC Irvine. She has twice been awarded fellowships from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. 

Publications

Co-Edited Books

Forthcoming: The Black Radical Tradition in the United States. Erin Gray, Asad Haider, Ben Mabie, eds. New York: Verso Press, 2022.

Articles

Forthcoming: “The Incendiary Image of Lynching: Now! and the Red Summer of 1965.” Black Camera (Spring 2022).

Forthcoming: "Grotesque Melonation in the Art of Mike Henderson." Mike Henderson: Before the Fire, 1965-1985. University of California Press, 2022.

"Facing Emmett in the New Nadir" Critical Ethnic Studies 7:1 (Spring 2021)

“Necrophagy at the Lynching Block.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21:1 (January 2015)

“‘Words are Fleshy Ducts’: Lisa Robertson and the Runnel Theory of Poetry.” Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory 14:5 (Spring 2011).

“The Good Sentences of Sleep: Parasomnia and ’Pataplay in the Poetry of Angela Rawlings and Sylvia Legris.” Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory 13:9 (Summer 2009).

“(En)countering Mortality: Reflections on Live Knowing.” The International Feminist Journal of Politics 11:1 (March 2009).

Public Scholarship

Introduction to “Lynching: A Weapon of National Oppression.” Viewpoint Magazine. January 9, 2017.

“Anti-Lynching Laws Were Never Meant to Defend Black Lives: The Case of Jasmine Abdullah.” Truthout. June 15, 2016.

“When the Streets Run Red: For a 21^st-Century Anti-Lynching Movement.” Mute. January 31, 2015.