Louis Chude-Sokei, professor of English and the George and Joyce Wein Chair of African American and Black Diaspora Studies at Boston University, is the 2026 recipient of the Teshome Gabriel Memorial Award. Presented by the University of California, Los Angeles’ School of Theater, Film, and Television, the award recognizes distinguished research and scholarship in Africana studies.
Dr. Chude-Sokei, who recently received a Guggenheim Fellowship in general nonfiction, has written extensively on the African diaspora. He is the author of The Last Darky: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2006), The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics (Wesleyan University Press, 2015), and Floating in the Most Peculiar Way: A Memoir (Mariner Books, 2021). His next book, Machines of Flesh and Blood: Race and the Making of Artificial Intelligence, is set for publication by Viking/Random House later this year.
Before joining the Boston University faculty in 2017, Dr. Chude-Sokei taught at the University of Washington, the University of California, Santa Cruz, Bowdoin College in Maine, Occidental College in Los Angeles, and the University of California, Los Angeles. Outside of his work in academia, Dr. Chude-Sokei is the founder of Echolocution, an international sonic art/archiving project.
Dr. Chude-Sokei is an honors graduate of UCLA, where he earned both a bachelor’s degree and a Ph.D. in English.
