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Keguro Macharia
Keguro Macharia is a Kenyan cultural critic and independent scholar based in Nairobi. A key voice in the emergent academic field of Queer African Studies, Macharia is also a frequent essayist and blogger. He received his PhD in English at the University of Champaign-Urbana and taught as an Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Maryland from 2009 to 2013. In his essay “On Quitting” (The New Inquiry) Macharia describes his decision to leave his tenure-track job and return to Kenya as partly undertaken to protect his mental health from the entrenched racism of the American academy. Macharia’s first book, Frottage: A New Understanding of Freedom in the Black Diaspora Grounded in the Erotic was released November 2019 as part of NYU Press’s Sexual Cultures Series.

Contributions to Queer African Studies (QAS)
According to Google Scholar analytics, Macharia was the first scholar to coin the phrase “Queer African Studies” to describe a then-unnamed body of scholarship emerging at the intersection of African Studies and Queer/LGBT Studies. This term has since become dominant in the field, with Macharia one of its most frequently-cited critical voices. Key articles include: “Archive and Method in Queer African Studies” (2015), “On being area-studied: A litany of complaint” (2016), and “5 reflections on trans* & taxonomy (with Neo Musangi), ” (2016).

Blogging
Macharia is a prolific blogger and often uses his personal blog Gukira as a space to outline ideas that he will later transform into scholarly articles. His entries often explore popular media and culture through his personal history as black queer Kenyan and draws on the writings of queer/diasporic theorists such as Audre Lorde, Sylvia Wynter, and Rinaldo Walcott. He also regularly contributes to The New Inquiry, where he writes a feature blog Wiathi focusing on “freedom/self-determination, cultural production, Kenyan law, and the black diaspora.”