Center for Environmental Humanities at Brown

Cherod Johnson is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center for Environmental Humanities at Brown University. They are a Black queer literary critic, writer, and visual artist. Their interdisciplinary work spans the 19th to the 21st centuries and includes African American literature, visual culture, and documentary film. Their research focuses on Black queer ecologies, decolonial theories of the Anthropocene, and the everyday ruptures that shape Black diasporic thought and its aesthetic expressions. Their current book manuscript explores how Black cultural producers address climate change and the environmental aftermath of slavery through hypervigilant acts of weathering, drawing our attention to the social drama of rescue and the limitations of repair. They received their Ph.D. in African Diaspora Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2025, where they were awarded a university-wide prize for excellence in teaching. They teach courses on the Black outdoors, Black ecologies, and Black queer film and literature, paying particular attention to the U.S. South and the Caribbean. Their work has appeared in Souls, The Diaspora, and QED.