Alphonso Grant
Professional Bio
Alphonso Walter Grant, is a W.E.B. Du Bois Scholar and dual title doctoral candidate and instructor in art education and African American and diaspora studies at Penn State. He is on the advisory board for the Black Male Empowerment Group, at Penn State and a member of the governing council for the Curriculum and Pedagogy Group. He is also a member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Incorporated. Grant was selected as a recipient of the 2014–15 Harold F. Martin Graduate Assistant Outstanding Teaching Award, which is sponsored jointly by Penn State's Graduate School and the Office of the Vice President and Dean for Undergraduate Education. He has presented keynote addresses, served as a panelist on discussions centered on the affects of a colonized gaze on Black Americans and what the effects of this gaze are in present day. Grant has authored and co-authored several peer reviewed book chapters and journal articles on how the arts can function as a White supremacist master narrative through rhetoric, visual representations of race, power, privilege and the role curriculum plays in the development and sustainability of racial inequity, when not examined critically.
Currently, his dissertation research is concentrated on reading Du Bois’s concepts on Black identity through a lens of the pragmatic historicist approach to Black identity. In addition, he highlights how visual depictions of Black men on the down low (DL) fit onto the landscape of representations of masculinity, Black masculinity, and Black gay men and how these depictions are echoed or reified in contemporary antecedents. Grant holds a master of science degree in art education with a minor in African American and diaspora studies from Penn State, and a bachelor of arts degree in political science with a minor in history from Henderson State University’s Honors College.
