Africana Studies / Rites and Reason Theatre

Bedour Alagraa is an Assistant Professor of Black Political and Social Theory in the department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She completed her PhD in Africana Studies in 2019. She also holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Toronto, a Masters in Race, Ethnicity, and Post-Colonial Studies from the London School of Economics, and was an Andrew W. Mellon Graduate Fellow during her time at Brown. Bedour's dissertation examined present-day legacies of the intellectual tradition of catastrophism and Black life post-Middle passage as a counternarrative/creative outside of traditional theorizations of catastrophe. More specifically, her dissertation explored modern-day ecological catastrophes as theatres for the reproduction of this intellectual tradition of catastrophism and equally Black political horizons and possibilities in opposition to and apart from this theoretical inheritance. More broadly, she is interested in Black Political Thought, especially Caribbean political thought, African anti-colonial thought (1920s-1980s,) and Black Marxism(s). Bedour has been published in several journals, including Critical Ethnic Studies, Contemporary Political Theory, The CLR James Journal of Caribbean Philosophy, and Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society.