John Brooks (he/him) is an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Studies and the Department of Theatre, Film, and Media Arts at the Ohio State University. His research and teaching interests include Black creative expression from the 19^th century to the present, radical and experimental aesthetics, performance studies, and projects of imagining and pursuing liberated Black futures. He is the author of The Racial Unfamiliar: Illegibility in Black Literature and Culture (Columbia University Press, Literature Now series, 2022). His work has been supported by the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University and the Department of English at Indiana University.

Graduate Courses Taught at The Ohio State University:
Foundations: Comparative Analysis and Sociocultural Theory 

Undergraduate Courses Taught at The Ohio State University:
African American Theatre History
American Icons
Criticizing Television
Literature and Ethnicity

Book:
The Racial Unfamiliar: Illegibility in Contemporary Black Literature and Culture (Columbia University Press, Literature Now Series, 2022).

Guest Editor
"Exercises in Joyful Improvisational Practice." Co-edited with Jonathan Leal. Special Issue of liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies 9, no. 1 (Forthcoming Spring 2025).

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles:
"Edgework and Excess: Jimi Hendrix, the Phenomenology of Fuzz, and the Rehearsal of Black Liberation." American Quarterly 76, no. 2 (2024): 189-215.

"Sandy's Root, Douglas's Mêtis: 'Black Art' and the Craft of Resistance in the Slave Narratives of Frederick Douglass." J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 9, no. 1 (2021): 185-205.

"Antiessentialist Form: The Bebop Effect of Percival Everett's Erasure." PMLA 134, no. 5 (2019): 1042-1055.

"The Heretical History of Robin Coste Lewis's The Voyage of the Sable Venus." African American Review 52, no. 3 (2019): 239-253.

Book Chapters:
"Satirizing Satire Itself: Atlanta's Appropriation Aesthetic and the Blackening of US Civil Society." Greater Atlanta: African American Satire since Obama. Ed. Derek C. Maus and James J. Donahue. University Press of Mississippi (University Press of Mississippi, 2024), 49-62.

"What's on Fitzgerald's Bookcase? A Rereading of 'The Jelly-Bean.'" The Romance of Regionalism in the Works of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald: The South Side of Paradise. Ed. Kirk Curnutt and Sara A. Kosiba. (Lexington Books, 2022), 121-134.

Short Pieces:
"How Should We Approach Black Literature and Art Now?"Columbia University Press Blog. 24 Oct. 2022. 1,735 words.

"Monumental Fugitivity: Confederate Statuary and the Aesthetics of #BlackLivesMatter Defacement." In the InMoment (Critical Inquiry Blog). 14 July 2021. 2,194 words.