Charles Nero

Charles Nero is the Benjamin E. Mays ’20 Distinguished Professor at Bates College and specializes in Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies, Africana, and American Cultural Studies. His scholarship and teachings revolve around African American literature, film, and Queer Studies. In 1991, he published “Toward a Black Gay Aesthetic: Signifying in Contemporary Black Gay Literature” which was the first-ever essay to provide a platform for analysis of black gay texts. His extensive list of publications have appeared in academic journals like Camera Obscura, Feminist Media Studies, Public Culture, FORECAAST, Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, The Howard Journal of Communication, andThe Journal of the History of Sexuality and as well several anthologies including Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men, Black Queer Studies in the Millennium, and Out in the South. He received his Ph.D. from Indiana University – Bloomington.  (Written by Perla Figuereo ‘21)