Dr. Deja Beamon is an Assistant Professor at the school of Humanities and Social Sciences at UMKC. Specializing in the intersections of race and gender, exploring the futurity of black feminism, she holds a PhD and MA in Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies from the Ohio State University and a BA in Women’s Studies with a Minor in English from Duke University. Her dissertation “Giving Birth to Blackness: The Black Biracial Daughter’s Liberatory Future” considered the changing nature of racialization under multiracialism. Through a close reading of the anti-Blackness within visions of the brown future, she highlights other entries into Black liberatory futurity for the Black biracial daughter by positioning Blackness as a desirable and forceful ontological position that is necessary for survival. She recently was awarded a Mellon fellowship at the Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens to pursue a new line of research utilizing Octavia E. Butler’s archival materials. She was the Visiting Regional Faculty Fellow at the Hall Center for Humanities at the University of Kansas. Dr. Beamon is invested in education as a practice of freedom, to borrow from bell hooks’ language, and sees her classroom as a space to build new worlds. Her public facing writing has been featured in Womanly Magazine, Food for Thought Zine, and The Get Free Telethon. She was the inaugural Digital Artist in Residency with Womanly Magazine in late 2020 and served on the Program Committee for Black Feminist Kitchen’s 2020 Black Feminist Summer School.
Prior to joining UMKC, Deja was PhD student at Ohio State University and an adjunct professor at Denison University.
AREAS OF RESEARCH/INTEREST
Black feminist theory; Black literature; Memory; Racialization; Futurity; Race, Ethnic and Gender Studies
EXTERNAL AFFILIATIONS
National Women’s Studies Association
Education
Ph.D. in Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies, The Ohio State University, 2022
M.A. in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, The Ohio State University, 2017
B.A. in Women’s Studies with a Minor in English, Duke University, 2013