Starting Fall 2025, Dr. Horsley will be on sabbatical
"My context for understanding the radical black female subject is a particular formulation of the black radical tradition that combines intellectual and activist work in the service of one’s oppressed communities." —Carole Boyce Davies, The Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (2008)
As Associate Professor and Coordinator of African Diaspora Studies, Dr. Horsley builds interdisciplinary curricular pathways that foreground Black radical traditions, sensory and metaphysical inquiry, and the political aesthetic of race and resistance. Her courses engage pleasure, power, and protest through a Black feminist lens, inviting students to examine Black horror, diasporic archives, digital storytelling, and the sensual grammars of embodiment.
She is engaged in the field of Race, Power, and Resistance Studies (RPR), an interdisciplinary field that analyzes the structures of racial power and the aesthetic, ecological, technological, and political traditions that contest them. Bringing together Black Studies, Africana philosophy, environmental humanities, feminist and queer of color critique, and digital studies, she examine how racialized power shapes life, land, technology, and embodiment, and how Black and diasporic communities cultivate strategies of resistance, creativity, and world-building in response.
Her research conceptualizes Black ecologies as the living and nonliving networks--fleshly, digital, celestial, watery, and ancestral--that organize Black life and afterlife. These ecologies include the voids, holes, and apertures through which blackness circulates, disappears, reemerges, and invents itself otherwise. She traces how metaphysical and ecological forces shape sensation, memory, creativity, and refusal, grounding a broader theory of Black art-making and Black being in the world.
Her work has appeared in The Black Scholar , Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies II , Venti Journal , the Journal of Hip Hop Studies, Religions, and other publications. She has also contributed to public discussions on race, gender, and sexuality in popular media outlets such as the Business Insider and Wallethub. She was a 2023-2024 Distinguished Visiting Fellow and Scholar in the Department of Africana and American Studies at the University at Buffalo and an invited presenter at the Humanities Institute Annual Conference, Black Studies and the Crises of Our Times (2025).
Dr. Horsley's teaching and scholarship move through the sensorial and the speculative, often drawing on ornament, ritual, and excess as aesthetic and philosophical strategies for understanding Black survival and creativity across time. Her work bridges African Diaspora Studies, Black feminist thought, metaphysics, digital humanities, and environmental and aesthetic humanities.
She has curated and led several public-facing and student-centered initiatives that engage race, embodiment, archives, and creative practice:
- 'Black to the Future Film Festival (in collaboration with Story House Ithaca): Featuring filmmaker and student panels, a live musical score to Within Our Gates performed by School of Music students, and a keynote conversation with Juice (1992) screenwriter Gerard Brown.
- Black Queer Speakers Series
- Scholar and Creative Residency
- The Student-Led Pleasure Lab : A space for research, dialogue, and creative work on race, rage, gender, pleasure, sexuality, and embodiment.
- The Ithaca College Black Obituary Project : A digital and archival project documenting Black life, grief, and resistance.
- Exhibits and Galleries : Hosted multiple student exhibitions focused on diaspora, archival practice, and experimental storytelling.
- Course-Based Projects : 3D modeling and printmaking grounded in frameworks like pleasure activism and Black sexual politics and sensory-based archive building.
- CSCRE newsletter: Revolucion´ (creator)
"I thought about what Zayd had always told me. 'While you're alive, girl, you betta live.'" -Assata Shaka, Assata: An Autobiography (1988)
“Everybody wants to live long; nobody wants to die. And yet death is the necessary price that we must pay for freedom.”
—Martin Luther King Jr., Eulogy for the Martyred Children (September 18, 1963)