Trimiko Melancon

A scholar, cultural critic, and documentary filmmaker, Dr. Trimiko Melancon is Professor of African American and African Studies at Michigan State University. An expert on race, gender, black feminist and sexualities studies; African American and American literary and cultural studies; African American and Black German studies; and race, media, digital and cultural production, Professor Melancon is the award-winning author of Unbought and Unbossed: Transgressive Black Women, Sexuality, and Representation (co-winner of the College Language Association Book Award). She is co-editor of Black Female Sexualities with Joanne M. Braxton with a foreword by Melissa Harris-Perry. Her scholarly publications have appeared in African American Review, Callaloo, Reconstruction, The Black Scholar, and Journal of Popular Culture. As a writer and cultural critic, she has also written widely and provided expert commentaries for venues ranging from Huffington Post, Ms., Elle, Wired, Black Perspectives and Diverse Issue in Higher Education to NBC and BBC World News, among other news outlets.

An inaugural visiting scholar and fellow at the Anna Julia Cooper Project on Gender, Race, and Politics at Tulane University and the James Weldon Johnson Institute for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies at Emory University, Professor Melancon has held numerous distinguished positions nationally and internationally: as the J. William Fulbright Scholar of American Literature and American Studies in Berlin, Germany, Andrew W. Mellon/Mellon Mays University Fellow (MMUF), Frederick Douglass Teaching Scholar, and a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation Fellow. She has also received other prestigious awards, grants, and fellowships that have facilitated the continued support of her interdisciplinary research and teaching from the Andrew W. Mellon, Nellie Mae, Ford, and Ruth Landes/Reed Foundations as well as the Social Science Research Council and Fulbright Commission.

As a filmmaker, she has directed, written, and produced shorts, including “I See You,” a montage about race and difference during the age of Black Lives Matter, and 1955 on civil rights icon Claudette Colvin. Her 2020 feature film, What Do You Have to Lose?, which explores the history of race and the racial and political climate—from the rise of Trump and the alt-right to Black Lives Matter and the death of George Floyd—won the Best Feature Documentary Audience Award.