Cherod Johnson

Cherod Johnson is a Research Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in 19th and 20th century African American literature, film, and photography across the U.S. and Caribbean. Their work critically engages with theories of race, pornography, sadomasochism, and the African diaspora, intersecting law, personhood, and finance capitalism through frameworks of queer theory, psychoanalysis, and feminist studies.

Johnson investigates queer articulations of blackness in literary and visual cultures, examining how anti-blackness shapes sociopolitical claims of personhood and rights discourse. Their scholarship explores how the black body disrupts conventional understandings of archive, memory, and subjectivity, potentially demanding public reckoning with systemic violence. Current research emphasizes the grammar of black embodiment within historical and contemporary financial systems.

Contact: cherodj27@berkeley.edu