Deja Beamon

Dr. Deja Beamon's research insists on Black futurity, by highlighting legacy building and modes of survival that occur within communal care. Her dissertation “Giving Birth to Blackness: The Black Biracial Daughter’s Liberatory Future” considered the changing nature of racialization under multiracialism. She centered the Black biracial daughter to trace how histories of miscegenation, white reproductive futurity, and hypodescent are shifted by the 1967 Loving v. Virginia ruling that legalized interracial marriage. Through a close reading of the anti-Blackness within visions of the brown future, she highlights other entries into Black liberatory futurity for the Black biracial daughter by positioning Blackness as a desirable and forceful ontological position that is necessary for survival. Dr. Beamon is invested in education as a practice of freedom, to borrow from bell hooks’ language, and sees her classroom as a space to build new worlds. Her public facing writing has been featured in Womanly Magazine, Food for Thought Zine, and The Get Free Telethon. She was the inaugural Digital Artist in Residency with Womanly Magazine in late 2020 and served on the Program Committee for Black Feminist Kitchen’s 2020 Black Feminist Summer School. She is invested in building bridges between academia, art, and the public in her teaching, writing, and facilitating.

Research Interests

• Black feminist theory
• Black literature
• Memory
• Racialization
• Futurity

Academic Credentials

• Ph.D. in Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies, The Ohio State University, 2022
• M.A. in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, The Ohio State University, 2017
• B.A. in Women’s Studies with a Minor in English, Duke University, 2013