Bryce Henson

Dr. Bryce Henson is an associate professor in the Department of Communication & Journalism and associate faculty in the Africana Studies Program and the Race & Ethnic Studies Institute 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, marronage & aquilombamento, media studies, popular culture, qualitative methods, and critical ethnography. His work has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar Program, the Foreign Language & Area Studies Fellowship, Tinker Foundation Fellowship, Carnegie-Mellon, the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, and the University of Illinois Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Associate Program.

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 his next book project. It analyzes Carnival as a nation-making dispositif in Brazil. Drawing upon literature, print media, participant observation, archives, and state representations, the project interrogates how Brazilian agencies, political figures, media, artists, and powerful actors deploy Carnival as a symbolic, discursive, and material mechanism to mold the racial, cultural, and ethnic boundaries around nationalism, belonging, and citizenship. The project has already received recognition. In 2023, Dr. Henson was awarded the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar at the Universidade Federal da Bahia (UFBA) to pursue this research in Spring 2024.

In his teaching, Dr. Henson teaches a variety of courses at the undergraduate and graduate level around media, cultural studies, critical theory, popular culture, globalization, and difference. 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.