Sam Tenorio

Professional Bio

Sam C. Tenorio is an interdisciplinary scholar who specializes in political theory with a research focus that sits at the nexus of anarchist practices, black political thought, and spatial and gender theory. They received their doctorate in African American Studies, with a subfield in Political Theory, from Northwestern University. Prior to joining the Departments of WGSS and African American Studies as an Assistant Professor, they held a post-doctoral fellowship with the Africana Research Center here at Penn State. Their current manuscript, Jump: Toward a Practice of Black Anarchism, provides a socio-spatial account of black anarchism that emerges from a central concern with slaves’ jumps from the slave ship. The project aims to demonstrate how a substantive theoretical attention to these jumps, most often a practice of enslaved women, generates possibilities for thinking about black radical politics differently. More broadly, their work is concerned with chattel slavery and its afterlives, specifically how carceral spatialities constitute the inextricable formations of race and gender.