Black Feminist Healer-Scholar

Dr. Wright is an assistant professor of Black Feminist Studies at George Washington University in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and American Studies. Their book project, Embodying Abolition: Healing Justice, Black Feminism and Ending Carcerality investigates how Black individuals communally and intimately live, resist, and care amid carceral forces. Situated in Black feminist thought, queer and trans studies, digital humanities, and carceral studies, their scholarship and research explores communal healing justice approaches to carceral abolition, centering the care, spiritual, and life flourishing practices of Black folks by tracing Black feminist genealogies of healing through historical and contemporary moments.

Following receiving their Ph.D. in Feminist Studies at the University of Minnesota, they were a Black Feminist Thought postdoctoral fellow at Northeastern University in Africana Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. They were awarded the Leadership in Equity, Inclusion, and Diversity Fellowship in 2020 and the 2021 Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship. Their work has been published in the Review of Communication, Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, and the American Studies Journal.

Dr. Wright was raised in Brooklyn, New York, lives in Washington, DC, and loves their plants, yoga, baking and cooking, embroidery, and crochet crafts.

Akae Wright identifies as queer and trans nonbinary. Jamaican, an immigrant, first generation to high school, college, and grad school. They use they/them pronouns. They have medium brown skin, black locs with golden tips, tattoos, a septum piercing and nose studs, a variety of ear piercings, and at times wear glasses.