Charles Athanasopoulos is a writer and teacher currently serving as Assistant Professor of Black Rhetoric & Popular Culture at The Ohio State University. Utilizing rhetorical and cultural methods of analysis, his research operates at the intersection of Black study, Caribbean studies, and critical Romani studies.

He asks the following questions: What social codes are imposed on Black and Roma people? What exceeds that imposition, and how do we resist it? What connections might be made across various dispossessed groups in such resistance? And how can we think reflexively about the constraints of even our most radical blueprints of liberation?

In responding to these questions, Athanasopoulos has developed an original concept of “Black iconoclasm” as a practice/method of Black cultural analysis which has garnered critical reception from interdisciplinary audiences. In Black Iconoclasm: Public Symbols, Racial Progress, and Post/Ferguson America(2024), he explores the development of Black Lives Matter, and the types of popular representations (positive/negative) that emerge in response, as the contextual scene for my practice. Thinking alongside Frantz Fanon’s “program of complete disorder,” he highlights various iterations of Black iconoclasm in popular culture across activism, Black radical theory, communicative situations, post-Ferguson U.S. cinema, and street art.

His second book-project-in-progress, Poetics of Negation, navigates new pathways through theories of “cimarronaje” (marronage/fugitivity) and “creolization” (cultural contact yielding unpredictable results) through a relational analysis of Afro-Puerto Rican and Greek-Roma sociality. This relational reading is guided by an engagement with Edouard Glissant’s remark that the archipelagoes of the Mediterranean and Caribbean should “encounter” one another, and Glissant’s stated connections between Afro-Caribbean and European Roma peoples. Athanasopoulos thus interrogates the new ways of thinking-feeling-doing-together which emerge from the ensemble of Black and Roma sociality which Western Man otherwise discards as unruly and chaotic.

As an advocate, Athanasopoulos co-founded and co-facilitates the CCAC (Columbus Community Abolition Collective) - a monthly reading and discussion-based group on prison abolition - alongside Dr. V.N. Trinh and Dr. Corinne Mitsuye Sugino. He also serves as an Associate Member of the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC), and has been invovled with a variety of pro-Puerto Rican independence organizations. In Spring 2025, Athanasopoulos co-founded the Black Rhetoric & Culture Collective (BRCC) alongside Dr. Darrian Carroll which networks Black diasporic scholars for co-writing sessions, peer-mentoring, and collaboration.