Dr. Bedour Alagraa is Assistant professor of Political and Social Thought in the Department of African and African diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Austin. A self-described ‘wayward political theorist’, she received her Ph.D. from the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University in the Spring of 2019, where she was an Andrew W. Mellon Graduate Fellow. She also holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Toronto, and a Masters in Race, Ethnicity, and Post-Colonial Studies from the London School of Economics. 

More broadly, Dr. Alagraa is interested in Black radical genealogies in political theory, history/ies of political concepts, Caribbean thought, African anti-colonial thought, and Black Marxism(s) (among other topics). She has also studied and written extensively on the works of Jamaican writer Sylvia Wynter; she recently completed the archiving of Wynter’s papers alongside a group of 5 other scholars, and is also a member of the editorial team currently editing Wynter’s monograph, Black Metamorphosis. Dr. Alagraa is also the co-editor of a volume of Chairman Fred Hampton’s Speeches alongside Chairman Fred Hampton Jr., titled I Am a Revolutionary!: Speeches by Chairman Fred Hampton, forthcoming from Pluto Press in early 2023. 

Her book manuscript is entitled The Interminable Catastrophe (forthcoming from Duke University Press), and charts a conceptual history of catastrophe as a political category/concept (rather than Event), via its inauguration in early modern natural science and empiricist debates, and subsequent crystallization as a concept on the plantation. The Interminable Catastrophe also considers how we might interrupt the 'Bad Infinity” of the catastrophic, via the work(s) of Sylvia Wynter, Kamau Brathwaite, Clyde Woods, Derek Walcott, and others.

Dr. Alagraa has been published in several journals, including Critical Ethnic Studies, Contemporary Political Theory, The CLR James Journal of Caribbean Philosophy, Small Axe, and Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society. She is currently co-editor, alongside Anthony Bogues, of the ‘Black Critique’ book series at Pluto Press.