Mission & Values

Brittney M. Edmonds is assistant professor of African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. A scholar of Black literary and cultural studies, Dr. Edmonds specializes in African American satire, the politics of literary form, and film and media studies. She is currently completing a book titled Who’s Laughing Now?: Black Experimental Satire and the Aesthetics of Decipherment, which traces a genealogy of Blak experimental satire from the 1960s to the present. The project argues that Black satirists deploy formal innovation to not only to critique but as a generative practice that contests literary recognition, institutional authority, and the racialized norms of the US literary marketplace. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Literary History, African American Review, MELUS, and Post45: Contemporaries. With Danielle Fuentes Morgan, she is co-editor of the forthcoming volume Oxford Handbook of African American Humor Studies.

Danielle Fuentes Morgan is an associate professor in English and Ethnic Studies at Santa Clara University, specializing in African American satire, humor/horror, and literature and popular culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She has written a variety of scholarly and popular articles on topics as varied as Black Lives Matter, race and The Twilight Zone, Black sisterhood in sitcoms, the satiric reappropriation of negative tropes, laughter as revolution, race and sexuality on the Broadway stage, My So-Called Life, and Beyoncé. Her first book, Laughing to Keep from Dying: African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century, was published by University of Illinois Press in 2020. She is the co-editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of African American Humor Studies with Oxford University Press and her book-in-progress, The Limits of Laughter: Black Millennials and the New Pop Culture, is under contract with Columbia University Press.

Beck Krefting specializes in critical stand-up comedy studies. Her monograph titled All Joking Aside: American Humor and Its Discontents charts the history and economy of charged humor or stand-up comedy in the service of social justice. She has published in dozens of books and journals and has been invited to present her scholarship nationally and internationally. She is a co-founder of the Critical Humor Studies Association and former vice-president and president of the American Humor Studies Association where she developed and spearheaded programming for graduate students and junior scholars publishing in the field of humor/comedy. She performs stand-up comedy in the central New York region (Instagram: @beckkrefting).
Check out her work here:

http://rebeccakrefting.com/

Raúl Pérez is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of La Verne. His research examines the relationship between racist humor in everyday, institutional, and political contexts and their impact on social boundaries, inequalities, and conflicts. His scholarship has been awarded and supported by the American Sociological Association, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Society for the Study of Social Problems, the University of California Center for New Racial Studies, and the Working-Class Studies Association. His research has been published in scholarly journals such as American Behavioral Scientist, Discourse & Society, Ethnicities, Social Semiotics, Sociological Perspectives, and Comedy Studies. His first book, The Souls of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy, published by Stanford University Press in 2022, was a Finalist for the 2022 C. Wright Mills Book Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and he received the 2023 Mary Douglas Book Prize from the American Sociological Association’s Section on the Sociology of Culture. His research and commentary have appeared in various media outlets, such as The Washington Post, TIME, NBC, The Los Angeles Times, Axios, and Harper’s Bazaar. And he was featured in the 2024 documentary, XCLD: The Story of Cancel Culture, for the MSNBC documentary series “The Turning Point,” executive produced by comedian Trevor Noah. He is a founding member and vice president of the Critical Humor Studies Association (CHSA), and an external advisor for the Democratic Literacy and Humor (DELIAH) project funded by the European Union. He is currently working on analyzing the intersection of humor, racism, and violence in a global context.

J Finley is a critical interdisciplinary scholar who studies Black women’s history, performance, and cultural expression. Specifically, Finley conducts ethnographic and interdisciplinary analyses of humor and comedic materials, paying close attention to how various aspects of history, identity and experience influence and saturate Black women’s expressive practices. She has published work in The Journal of Popular Culture, Hypatia, Studies in American Humor, among other academic journals. Her first book Sass: Black Women’s Humor and Humanity (UNC Press 2024) presents the first ethnographic study of Black women’s humor, offering a comprehensive reading of its personal, poetic, and political dimensions from slavery to today. Her teaching interests include Black feminist theories, popular culture, struggles for Black liberation, and critical humor studies.  Finley is co-founder of the Critical Humor Studies Association.

As a PhD student at Cleveland State University studying Education/Adult Learning, my research explores how stand-up comedy can teach adults about power and identity. I am also the Director of Employee and Organizational Development in Human Resources at CSU. I hold master’s degrees in community social work and nonprofit management from Case Western Reserve University, and I have lots of experience serving on boards in my local community, such as Cleveland’s Feminist Chorus, Larchmere PorchFest, and as a volunteer for the Maltz Museum of Jewish History. I look forward to the opportunity to help shape this evolving organization and am excited about the many possibilities ahead! 

Diego A. Millan is Associate Professor of English and Africana Studies at W&L University. He is completing his first book, tentatively titled Laughing at the End of the World. which brings together insights from Black Studies, theories of laughter, and Black diasporic literature to examine the cultural politics and critical traditions that structure the racialization of laughter.

He dreams growing an orchard of fruiting trees.

Shaoyu Tang is a 3rd year PhD student in Anthropology at the University of Southern California. He is broadly interested in visual culture, media, and performance, as well as the political potency of different forms of storytelling, mediation, and creativity. His dissertation project investigates how stand-up comedians from Northeast China mediate between personal experience and public feeling and aims to offer an ethnographical account of the relationship between affect and the politics of public culture in contemporary China. His recent work on Chinese stand-up comedy and feminism is published in Global Storytelling: Journal of Digital and Moving Images.

Dr. Friedman is a satire scholar and studied English and Italian at Bryn Mawr College for her BA, and English Literature at Goldsmiths College, University of London for her PhD. She published Postcolonial Satire: Indian Fiction and the Reimagining of Menippean Satire (Lexington 2019) and is currently at work on a book on satire literacy. She has taught courses in satire, American and British literatures, Environmental Justice, Postcolonial writing and theory, Anglo-American Women Modernists, and the countercultural writing of the Beat Generation and The Angry Young Men. She has published widely on satire, and on women writers of the Beat Generation. Right now she is based in Kyoto, teaching literature and first-year writing courses at Temple University Japan’s new Kyoto campus. Konnichiwa!

She is the author of the award-winning book, “Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes” (Columbia UP, 2018), a curator of the 4-disc DVD/Blu-ray collection “Cinema’s First Nasty Women” (Kino Lorber, 2022), an editor of the journal “Cultural Critique,” and co-editor of two volumes, “Unwatchable” (Rutgers UP, 2019) and “Abjection Incorporated: Mediating the Politics of Pleasure and Violence” (Duke UP, 2020). Her new book, “Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema” (Columbia UP, 2024) reveals the untold history of women who allegedly died from laughing too hard. 

Kanu is curious about the role of humor, entertainment, and creativity in our everyday lives and how these elements shape our understanding of our complex worlds. He explores these curiosities with a comparative lens between the US and India, and with an evolving toolkit that combines my backgrounds in computer science, social neuroscience, communication, and improvisational comedy. As co-founder of the South Asian Humor Studies Collective, he continues to collaboratively address geographic under-representation in humor scholarship by cooperatively developing a transnational community and promoting situated theory-building from the region.

Massih Zekavat is Researcher and Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. He is author of Satire, Humor and the Construction of Identities (John Benjamins) and co-author of Satire, Humor, and Environmental Crises (Routledge). His Leveraging Satire for Environmental Advocacy: Creative Arts in the Chthulucene (Palgrave Macmillan) is forthcoming.