Bryce Henson

Dr. Bryce Henson is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication & Journalism and associate faculty in the Africana Studies Program at Texas A&M University. He received his PhD in Communications & Media with a focus on cultural studies and interpretative theory from the Institute of Communications Research and a graduate minor in Latin American & Caribbean Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His research and teaching interests include African Diaspora studies, cultural studies, global Black intellectual traditions, urban studies, marronage & aquilombamento, media studies, popular culture, qualitative methods, and critical ethnography. He is the author of Emergent Quilombos: Black Life and Hip-Hop in Brazil (University of Texas Press, 2023). The book won the following awards: the 2024 National Communication Association (NCA) Critical/Cultural Studies Division Book of the Year Award, the 2024 NCA Ethnography Division Best Book Award, and the 2024 NCA International & Intercultural Division Best Book Award. In addition, the book received honorable mention for the 2024 Roberto Reis First Book Prize Award from the Brazilian Studies Association. Dr. Henson is also a co-editor of Spaces of New Colonialism: Reading Schools, Museums, and Cities in the Tumult of Globalization (Peter Lang, 2020). His journal articles and book chapters are published across outlets in communication, cultural studies, Black studies, Latin American studies, and anthropology.

Dr. Henson is currently working on two book-length projects. The first explores the entwinements between the carnivalesque and the state of exception inside Brazilian Carnival and how it extends into the very fabric of Brazilian society. Drawing upon literature, print media, participant observation, archives, and state representations, the book interrogates how sites of racialized exclusion and violence become carnivalesque spheres of taboo pleasure, joy, and desire as well as modes of identity formation and nation-making for non-Black people. The project has already received recognition. In 2023, Dr. Henson was awarded the Fulbright Distinguished Chair at the Universidade Federal da Bahia to pursue this research in Spring 2024. The other project engages Lélia Gonzalez’s theory of amefricanidade (Amefricanity) to analyze Black cultural and political connections in the Americas that do not route to neither North America nor the African continent. It does so by cutting across linguistic boundaries to foreground similarities and exchanges of Black music and Pan-African politics between Black communities in Brazil and Jamaica.

In his teaching, Dr. Henson teaches a variety of courses at the undergraduate and graduate level. At the undergraduate level, he teaches courses on Black media, global media, popular culture, and gender, race, & media. At the graduate level, he has taught courses on Black cultural studies, media & identity, Black cultural geographies, and media studies. He looks forward to working with students who desire to use qualitative methods, especially ethnography, to research the political stakes of social difference and cultural practices on communities and social phenomena in the United States and around the globe. 

Professionally, Dr. Henson is a member of several scholarly associations. These include the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD), National Communication Association (NCA), American Studies Association (ASA), Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA), the Association of Black Anthropologists (ABA), and American Anthropology Association (AAA), among others.  He currently sits as an advisory board member for ASWAD. He is also an associate editor for Transforming Anthropology, the official ABA journal.