Dr Alírio Karina

Assistant Professor of Black Studies

Email: alirio.karina@warwick.ac.uk

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Room 5.19, Faculty of Arts Building
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7EQ

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About

Alírio Karina is Assistant Professor of Black Studies in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies. Prior to joining Warwick in 2024, he taught at UC Santa Cruz, for the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, as well as for Mimbres School for the Humanities, where he remains Organizer and on the faculty. From 2020-2023, he held an NRF Postdoctoral Fellow in the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative at the University of Cape Town, and from 2023-2024 was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Princeton University's African Humanities Colloquium.

Research interests

Blackness, Africanity, and the figure of the 'Native'; race, caste and dynasty; slavery as history and metaphor; anthropological and broader race-scientific discourses (incl. photography, material collection); the politics of memory; toleration, disavowal and political violence; witchcraft and sacrifice; Mudimbe; Kristeva.

Teaching and supervision

In 2026/7, I am teaching the modules The Narrative of Slavery, Race Objects, and, with Beth Sharrock, Aaron to Othello.

I welcome supervision inquiries from postgraduate students interested in any of the topics listed above.

Selected publications

• "Conjugating African Studies: V.Y. Mudimbe (1941-2025)", Journal of World Philosophies 11(1): 159-170 (2026)
• Editor (with Duane Jethro), Special Issue of Social Dynamics, "After the Fire: Loss, Archive and African Studies" (2024), with extended introduction.
• "Refusing to Vanish: Despair, Contingency and the African Political", Diacritics 49(4):76-99 (2023)
  • Reprinted as a chapter in Africa Beyond Inventions (Palgrave Macmillan 2024)
• "Against and beyond the museum", Third Text 36(6):651–662 (2022)

Qualifications

• BSocSci, BSocSci(Hons) (University of Cape Town)
• MA, PhD (University of California, Santa Cruz)