A Distinguished and Presidential Professor of English and American Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Robert Fitzgerald Reid-Pharr holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University and a B.A. in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  He is currently the director of the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean (IRADAC).  A specialist in African American culture and a prominent scholar in the field of race and sexuality studies, he has published three books: Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American, Oxford University Press, 1999; Black, Gay, Man: Essays, NYU Press, 2001; and Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual, NYU Press, 2007.  His essays have appeared in, among other places, American Literature, American Literary History, Callaloo, Afterimage, Small Axe, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Women and Performance, Social Text, Transition, Studies in the Novel, The African American Review, Feminist Formations, and Radical America.  He lives in Brooklyn.