Biography
Professor Allen is the author of "There’s a Disco Ball Between Us: A Theory of Black Gay Life" — co-winner of the 2023 Gregory Bateson Book Prize from the Society for Cultural Anthropology, and "¡Venceremos?: The Erotics of Black Self-Making in Cuba," a critical ethnography of race, gender, sexuality, and revolution — nominated for the Lambda Literary Nonfiction Award. Among other works, he is the editor of "Black/Queer/Diaspora," a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, and the author of a new introduction, “Crucial Palimpsest: Re-Reading Brother to Brother,” to the reissued "Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men."
His scholarship and teaching have opened new lines of inquiry and offered reinvigorated methods of Black feminist narrative theorizing and praxis in Black Studies, anthropology, and queer studies. He has conducted ethnographic research in Cuba and the Caribbean for more than twenty years; recent fieldwork has also taken him to East Africa, Brazil, and Western Europe.
Dr. Allen’s recent public writing on Black Studies, democracy, and Cuba includes “The Machine That Came for Jason Arday” (The Nation, August 2026), "The Dismantling of Black Studies" (The Nation, June 2026), "The Erasure of Black Studies: A Report from the Undoing of a Field" (The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 2026); "Cuba Sent Doctors. Washington Sent a Destroyer" (Al Jazeera English, April 2026), and "When the Lights Go Out in Cuba" (A Native Son, April 2026). He founded and co-directed the Center for Global Black Studies at the University of Miami. He previously held a joint appointment in African American Studies and Anthropology at Yale University, and in the Center for African and African American Studies and Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin.
