Director, Center for the Study of Black Life and the Law
Associate Professor of Law
Dr. T. Anansi Wilson is an award-winning scholar of law, literary and cultural studies, a racial-justice strategist, and an author of creative nonfiction. Their legal research is situated in legal philosophy, critical theory, political economy, and constitutional law. Their writing and scholarship primarily focuses on the history of Black thought, art, and imagination crafted in response to, and resistance against, the social, political, and legal realities of domination in the West. They seek to understand the processes of retrenchment after moments of social progress, and how freedom dreams are nevertheless sustained. Wilson’s work analyzes the ever changing relationships between race, law, sexuality, power, and citizenship; both in the construction of law and policy and the maintenance of the way we live our lives. They are particularly concerned with Fourth, 13th, 14th, and 15th amendment questions. Their teaching interests include criminal law, criminal procedure, constitutional law, federal criminal civil rights, Fourth, 13th and 14th amendment law, Reconstruction, political and civil rights, critical race studies, LGBTQ issues, and all areas pertaining to race, law, and society.
T. Anansi Wilson employs Critical Race, Black Feminist, Performance and Women & Gender Studies and legal methodologies to examine how instances and (extra) legal precedents of anti-Black violence and racial-sexual terror continue to frame and impact notions of Black being and citizenship. Professor Wilson employs a multidisciplinary gaze to engage the creative, the legal, and the literary to uncover an emerging approach to encountering, understanding, and extrapolating anti-Blackness as a jurisprudential logic, underpinning, and precedent embedded in the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, and decisions they inform.
Dr. Wilson was inducted into the Martin Luther King Jr. Collegium of Scholars at Morehouse College in October 2022.
“Each classroom I co-create is meant to be a democratic space, and by nature a transgressive space. The goal is to give voice to students; while arming them with the tools to make that voice as beautiful and useful to them and their communities as possible and by useful, I mean liberatory. My classroom is grounded, if not lifted, in the concepts of critical pedagogy and guided by what Hill-Collins and Hortense Spillers have noted as the pivoting center. Much like critical race theorists though, we are attentive to racialized and other form of silent, yet hegemonic power structures and reasonings seek to name and dislodge them; this is part of the democratization process.
Here, we privilege embodied knowledges and flesh theories and we place them in conversation with what has been written, spoken, performed and created. There are no hierarchies here. We embrace knowledges from law and legal studies; sociology and Black studies; Queer and Trans theory; Chicanx and American Studies; Philosophy and Performance Studies and wherever else knowledge might be found. This classroom is a beautiful mess. It is a space of frightening possibility. It embraces a BlaQueer gaze—a space of sight that includes race, gender, sexuality and their co/deforming embrace—while also noting that its vision isn’t final or authoritative. This classroom understands each student to be a young multiverse of knowledge and possibility; and endeavors to treat them as such and foster our growth as a constellation of ever-changing knowledges.”
Education
Ph.D., 2021, University of Texas at Austin
J.D., 2017, Howard University School of Law
B.A., honos civicus, 2013, Tufts University
Experience
Mitchell Hamline School of Law, associate professor of law, 2022–; assistant professor of law, 2021–22
University of California at Hastings College of Law and The Center for Racial and Economic Justice, affiliated scholar and adjunct faculty of constitutional law, 2020–21
Middle Tennessee State University, dissertation fellow and lecturer in political science and international relations and global studies and human geography, 2019–20
University of Texas, teaching assistant, Institute for Urban Policy, Research and Analysis, 2018–19
Beloit College, Ousley Scholar in Residence, 2018
Dartmouth College, summer fellow, Futures of American Studies, 2018
University of California at Irvine, executive committee member, Journal of Law and Political Economy, 2017–19
StandUpKC, labor and community organizer, 2017
Ashoka Foundation, social entrepreneurship consultant, 2017
Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, law clerk, 2016–17
National Body Camera Policy Group at Howard University School of Law, group member, 2016–17
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, law clerk, enforcement, policy and supervision, 2015–16
University of California at Berkeley, Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, summer law fellow, 2015
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, coordinator of National HIV/AIDS Advisory and Planning Committee, 2013–15
