Shanté Paradigm Smalls

Shanté Paradigm Smalls is a scholar, artist, and writer. Smalls’s teaching and research focuses on Black popular culture in music, film, visual art, genre fiction, and other aesthetic forms. Dr. Smalls’ first book, Hip Hop Heresies: Queer Aesthetics in New York City, which won the 2016 CLAGS Fellowship Award for best manuscript in LGBTQ Studies, will be published by NYU Press in June 2022. Smalls’s writing has appeared in QED,The Black Scholar, GL/Q, Women & Performance, Criticism, Lateral, American Behavioral Scientist, Suspect Thoughts, Syndicate Literature, and the Oxford Handbook of Queerness and Music. Dr. Smalls is currently an Associate Professor of Black Studies in the Department of English and Faculty in the Critical Race & Ethnic Studies Institute, and Founding Co-Director of the LGBTQ+ Center at St. John’s University in New York City. Smalls has held fellowships from University of Rochester Humanities Center, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, The Institute for Citizens & Scholars (formerly Woodrow Wilson Foundation), and the James Weldon Johnson Fellowship at Emory University. Dr. Smalls received their PhD in Performance Studies from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, their MA in Performance Studies from NYU, and their BA in English and Theatre from Smith College. They are a Series Editor of Critical Race, Indigeneity, and Relationality at Temple University Press To see more, go to Dr. Smalls’s website: http://shanteparadigm.com