Dylan Rodríguez is a teacher, scholar, organizer, and collaborator who has maintained a day job as a professor at the University of California, Riverside since 2001. He is a faculty member in the recently created Department of Black Study, as well as the Department of Media and Cultural Studies. Rodríguez was elected president of the
American Studies Association by his peers in 2020, the same year in which he was named to the inaugural class of
Freedom Scholars.
Rodríguez's lifework focuses on liberationist, anticolonial, and abolitionist confrontations with the antiblack, colonial, and white supremacist violences that permeate the ongoing Civilization project. He is devoted to studying and teaching the historical, collective genius of rebellion, survival, and insurgent futurity that radically challenge dominant forms of authority, power, and institutionality.
Since the late 1990s, Rodríguez has participated as a founding member of organizations like Critical Resistance, Abolition Collective, Critical Ethnic Studies Association, Cops Off Campus, Scholars for Social Justice, and the UCR Department of Black Study, among others. He has worked closely with Southern California Library, Critical Resistance Abolitionist Educators, Strike MoMA, Underground Scholars Initiative, Dissenters, and numerous other organizations and collectives. He is the author of three books, most recently
Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logic of Racial Genocide (Fordham University Press, 2021), which won the
2022 Frantz Fanon Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association.
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