Research Overview

Matthew Omelsky is an assistant professor in the Department of English and the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies. He is also a core faculty member in the Frederick Douglass Institute and Department of Black Studies and a faculty affiliate in Film and Media Studies. His research is concentrated in the field of global black cultural studies, with an emphasis on how 20^th and 21^st century black artists from across the world express a desire for unfathomable freedoms.

Omelsky is the author of Fugitive Time: Global Aesthetics and the Black Beyond (Duke UP 2023), which theorizes the embodied experience of time in an archive of black music, visual culture, and literature from Zimbabwe, Martinique, Britain, Senegal, and the United States. The book examines the intersection of black fugitivity, time-consciousness, and utopian desire in a range of work, from Aimé Césaire and Wifredo Lam’s négritude aesthetics, to the Black Audio Film Collective's experimental essay films, to Sun Ra’s avant-garde music and poetry, to NoViolet Bulawayo’s contemporary fiction. Continuing his research on global black aesthetics, his current project, Black Speculative Experiments, looks at 21^st century electronic music, film, fiction, poetry, and sculpture that expand the limits of the thinkable and the intelligible through a confluence of the speculative mode and formal experimentation. The project focuses on how Chino Amobi, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, the Otolith Group, and other artists reimagine the conditions of contemporary society, assembling distinct conceptions of global blackness in response to the layered crises of our time.

Omelsky currently serves on the executive committee of the Africa Since 1990 Forum of the Modern Language Association. In 2023, he was recognized with the University of Rochester’s G. Graydon and Jane W. Curtis Award for Nontenured Faculty Teaching Excellence. Before coming to Rochester, he was the postdoctoral fellow for the 2018-2019 Mellon Sawyer Seminar on “Racial Disposability and Cultures of Resistance” in Penn State’s Department of African American Studies. He received his BA in Africana Studies and Politics from New York University, his MPS in Africana Studies from Cornell University, and his PhD in English from Duke University.

Research Interests

• Global black cultural studies; African, African American, and Caribbean literatures; film and media studies; speculative aesthetics; time and phenomenology; critical theory.