Dr. Charles Athanasopoulos was recently elected the Vice President of the Cultural Studies Association. Per CSA guidelines, Dr. A will serve a two-year term followed by a two-year term as President of the Association.

Using the management of Black athlete protest (e.g., Colin Kaepernick, Naomi Osaka, LeBron James, Brittney Griner) in the post-Ferguson era as a foil, Fred Moten, Roberto Sirvent, and Charles Athanasopoulos engage in a critical conversation surrounding Black sociality which has bearing on the arenas of sports, art, and the academy. The discussants ponder the appropriate terms for considering how Black athletes themselves may have their own investments in the logics which reduce them to countable units: perversity, codependency, co-option, complicity, ambivalence, do words even go there? How do such terms come each with their own assumptive and diagnostic logics? How do we relinquish our search for purity (of an arena, person, community, object of study) as concomitant with Black liberation? Moten also comments on how the logics of individuation come to bear on academics in thinking about the meaning of “fellowship” in the university. Such commentary dovetails with Moten’s critical inversion of Allen Iverson’s infamous line on “practice” as a way of thinking about Black sociality beyond the “game.” The conversation thus ends with a reflection on how scholars, students, and activists can “see through” the individuating logics of recognition or purity by refocusing on the “practice” and “fellowship” of Black study/activism.

Please join us to discuss Black Iconoclasm (2024) on Saturday, Nov 22nd, 2025 @ 2:30PM.

Also, please join us on Thursday, 4-5pm, for a Prize Reception for Black Iconoclasm at the Palgrave Macmillan Booth.

Charles Athanasopoulos’ Black Iconoclasm: Public Symbols, Racial Progress, and Post/Ferguson America (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) was just awarded the NCA CCSD Book of the Year Award. This follows Black Iconoclasm previously being awarded the Cultural Studies Association 2025 First Book Prize.

On May 30th, 2025, Black Iconoclasm: Public Symbols, Racial Progress, and Post/Ferguson America was awarded The Cultural Studies Association’s 2025 First Book Prize. During the CSA Plenary, Robert F. Carley, President of CSA, lauded the project for its originality, creativity, and for extending the important work of Black cultural theorist Stuart Hall to think the current post/Ferguson era.

“This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods. Today’s conversation is with Charles Athanasopoulos, who teaches in the Department of African American and African Studies at Ohio State University. He is the author of a number of scholarly pieces on politics and Black cultural life, as well as the book Black Iconoclasm: Public Symbols, Racial Progress, and Post-Ferguson America. In this conversation, we discuss the role of rhetorical traditions in Black Studies, iconic figures and moments in Black history and culture, and the various expressions of blackness and Black life in the political work of liberation struggle.”

In this talk, Charles Athanasopoulos delivers preliminary remarks on his second book project, tentatively titled Poetics of Negation. Poetics of Negation explores the ways of thinking/being/resisting which emanate from the seemingly disparate Afro-Puerto Rican and Greek-Roma communities across Puerto Rico, Greece, and the United States. Engaging Martiniquais philosopher Édouard Glissant’s embrace of trace (anti-system) thought, archipelagic thinking, and creolization, the book traverses space/place (landscape), musical traditions, personal reflections, religious iconography, community festivals, and institutional archives. In doing so, Poetics of Negation navigates new pathways through Glissant’s impression that “the archipelagos of the Mediterranean must encounter the archipelagos of Asia, and the archipelago of the Antilles.”

“Today’s episode features a thought-provoking conversation with Dr. Charles Athanasopoulos, Assistant Professor of African American and African Studies & English at The Ohio State University, about his groundbreaking new book, Black Iconoclasm: Public Symbols, Racial Progress, and Post/Ferguson America. On the show, Alex and Calvin talk with Charles about the intricate relationship he charts between Black freedom struggles, the power of icons (and their destruction), and the complex liminalities of social change in contemporary America.”

ERIAC acts as an international creative hub to support the exchange of creative ideas across borders, cultural domains and Romani identities. ERIAC aims to be the promoter of Romani contributions to European culture and talent, success and achievement, as well as to document the historical experiences of Romani people in Europe. ERIAC exists to be a communicator and public educator, to disseminate a positive image and knowledge about Romani people for dialogue and building mutual respect and understanding.

Dr. Athanasopoulos Joins the Editorial Board of Quarterly Journal of Speech, the flagship journal of the National Communication Association

Judas and the Black Messiah (2021) is a call back to the historical Black power era to re-tell the story of Fred Hampton. Against popular depictions of the Black Panther Party as a violent terroristic group, director Shaka King offers an alternative narrative in which Hampton is assassinated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) with the help of an information William “Bill” O’Neal. By King’s own admission, this film is an allegory for the present post/Ferguson era which is meant to drive its audiences toward a more nuanced political consciousness concerning the fight to make Black lives matter (Russell 2021). Rather than uncritically praise or malign Judas and the Black Messiah (JATBM), this review engages Sylvia Wynter’s (1992) notion of a “deciphering” practice which thinks through both the Black radical excess and residues of Western Man present in popular media/art. The point, then, is not to render a yes/no judgement on this film, but to instead think through the multiple and sometimes conflicting messages we receive about Black liberation in our current cultural moment.

This essay was recently published in AfroPiq (Black Power Media) featuring a short meditation on Dr. Athanasopoulos’ newly published monograph Black Iconoclasm.

This recent catalogue essay was recently released by the National Liberty Museum (Philadelphia, PA) in conjunction with Philadelphia Sculptor’s to accompany the exhibition “In Pursuit: Artists’ Perspectives on a Nation”.

Contributors Charles Athanasopoulos, Jeanne Dreskin, Paul Farber, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Naomieh Jovin, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Shannon Mattern, Nicholas Mirzoeff, TK Smith, and Marisa Williamson consider the specters, haunting sensations, and eerie remnants of the past as they relate public art, space, and memory.

Dr. Athanasopoulos’ “Fanonian Slips: The Rhetorical Function & Field of the White Mask” featured in Western Journal of Communication, has been awarded the National Communication Association Critical and Cultural Studies Division Outstanding Article Award.

The Black and Indigenous Futures Convening brings together artists, scholars, educators, and practitioners to unearth history, examine fault lines, and imagine new and different futures.

Roundtable on decolonization efforts by Puerto Rican independentistas.

Public letter, panel, & fundraising effort in the wake of the most recent Hurricane in Puerto Rico.

Read the interview via Black Agenda Report.