Chad Infante

Chad B. Infante is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland College Park. Chad earned his doctorate in English from Northwestern University in 2018. He is originally from Jamaica and studies Black and Indigenous U.S. and Caribbean literatures, film, gender, sexuality, critical theory, and political philosophy. Chad has published the essay “Colonial Metaphor, Colonial Metaphysics: On the Poetic Pairing of Blackness and Indianness in Diacritics in the Spring of 2023 and has a forthcoming essay in American Indian Quarterly entitled “Colonial Etiology: Globalism and the Debate Between Black and Native American Studies.”

His book manuscript Grammars of Interrogation: Murder and the Metaphysics of Gender in Black and Indigenous U.S. Literature is forthcoming in the spring of 2026 with the University of Minnesota Press. This study explores representations of anticolonial murder, vengeance, and revenge in Black and Indigenous literature and art as a philosophical response to colonial violence, a way to read Black and Native literature together, and as a desire for a feminist and queer rendition of revolution. He is a comparatist and is currently working on his second book manuscript, Play: a Racial and Social History of Children’s Television. This project reads the history of children’s television and film through the intersection of Black and Native American Studies, drawing on UMD’s archival holdings in Sesame Street and on the alumni legacies of Jim Henson, Jeff Kinney and Aaron McGruder.