Assistant Director, Institute for African American Studies Acadamic Professional Jerry Rafiki Jenkins is Assistant Director of the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Georgia. Rafiki holds a doctorate in Literature from the University of California, San Diego, and his research focuses on Black speculative fiction and film, with an emphasis on horror, and future human studies. Rafiki is the author of Anti-Blackness and Human Monstrosity in Black American Horror Fiction (Ohio State UP, 2024) and The Paradox of Blackness in African American Vampire Fiction (Ohio State UP, 2019), and he co-edited, with Martin Japtok, Human Contradictions in Octavia E. Butler’s Work (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and Authentic Blackness/Real Blackness: Essays on the Meaning of Blackness in Literature and Culture (Peter Lang, 2011). Rafiki has also authored several book chapters, and his peer-reviewed articles appear in Pacific Coast Philology, Screening Noir, African American Review, Journal of Children’s Literature, and Science Fiction Studies.
