Starting Fall 2025, Dr. Horsley will be on sabbatical
"Come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed." - Lucille Clifton
"Power rarely disappears--it adapts, reorganizes, and returns" -Octavia E. Butler
M. Nicole Horsley is Associate Professor and Coordinator of African Diaspora Studies. Her teaching and research explore how Black communities imagine freedom, create culture, and transform the world through film, music, visual art, technology, philosophy, and Black feminist thought. She works across African Diaspora Studies, Race, Power, and Resistance, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Film Studies to help students ask big questions about history, justice, creativity, and the future.
Dr. Horsley's research develops a Black metaphysics of apertures, voids, and relational ecologies. Her work examines how Black life emerges through absences, thresholds, wounds, disappearances, and other forms of spatial, sensual, and metaphysical opening. Working across Black Studies, public health, Black feminist theory, visual culture, philosophy, and digital humanities, she asks how Black communities create worlds within conditions often understood as lack, rupture, or impossibility. Her scholarship moves across several archives--visual, material, and sonic cultures, artificial intelligence, environmental formations, sexuality, medicine, public health, cinema, and digital culture--to develop new metaphysical and aesthetic approaches to Black Studies.
Her current book project, traces the hole as a recurring grammar of Black existence across flesh, digital technologies, water, ecology, visual culture, sexuality, medicine, death, and the cosmos. Moving through apertures such as wounds, throats, ocular openings, denotes, oceans, spillways, black holes, artificial companions, archives, and other material and metaphysical thresholds, the project argues that these sites are not simply absences but conditions through which Black life continually reappears, invents itself, and imagines otherwise.
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).
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)