Dr. Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman is Associate Professor of English, African and Afro-American Studies, and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University. She will join the Institute's faculty as a visiting professor in the fall term 2014. Her areas of specialization include critical ethnic studies and US literary and cultural studies. Her first book, Against the Closet: Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Race, was published by Duke University Press in 2012.  For her research Dr. Abdur-Rahman has been awarded fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the American Association of University Women, the Mellon Foundation, and the W.E.B Du Bois Institute at Harvard University. While in residence at the John F. Kennedy Institute's Graduate School of North American Studies, she will undertake research for her second book, which analyzes aesthetic experiments in new millennial US fiction and visual art in order to illuminate the ways in which, amidst the global circulation of capital and of persons, political desire both shapes and resists representation. AT GSNAS she will also teach, with Prof. Dr. Florian Sedlmeier, the graduate course, Disciplinary Theory and Methods in Literary and Cultural Studies.