Watufani M. Poe

Watufani M. Poe is an assistant professor of activist media in Tulane’s Department of Communication. He is an interdisciplinary social scientist whose work lies at the intersection of Africana Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Anthropology, Communication, and History. His research interests are in the areas of Black Queer/Trans Diaspora Studies, feminist ethnography, racial intimacies, as well as media and cultural production within social justice movements. His manuscript project, “Resisting Fragmentation: The Embodied Politics of Black Queer Worldmaking,” is an ethnohistoric analysis of Black LGBTQ+ social and political activism in Brazil and the United States to outline the ways Black LGBTQ people push for freedom across various social and political movement spaces and imagine alternative worlds.

Before joining the faculty at Tulane, he served as faculty at the University of Pittsburgh and as a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Amherst College. He is currently working on a special issue on the topic of “Manifesting Black Queer Futures,” continuing work that he began as a four-part symposium at Amherst with collaborators Jallicia Jolly and Pablo Joseph López Oro.

Throughout his academic career, he has held research fellowships from the U.S. Fulbright Program, the Social Science Research Council, the Tinker Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Brown University Brazil Initiative.

You can find his published and forthcoming work in the African American Intellectual History Society’s blog Black Perspectives, the Revista Brasileira de Estudos da Homocultura, and the Journal of Women, Gender, and Families of Color.

Selected Publications

• Poe, Watufani M. 2025. “Making Black Queer Worlds: Black LGBTQ+ Parties in Brazil and the United States” . The Sociological Quarterly 66, no. 4: 675–699.
• Poe, Watufani M. “Black Brazilian Media Producers and the Nomination of Marte Um” . Black Perspectives, African American Intellectual History Society, April 6, 2023.