The Morning Star Research Center for the Afterlife of Slavery (MSRCAS) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization in California dedicated to the collection, study, and presentation of materials that engage with the ongoing legacies of Atlantic slavery and antiblackness in the United States and abroad. Located in Los Angeles, MSRCAS operates as a reading room, viewing room, and archival resource that supports theoretical research, curatorial inquiry, and public programming related to the legacies of Atlantic slavery. With a focus on both historical and contemporary materials—including books, rare books, exhibition catalogs, artist publications, and a media library—MSRCAS serves as a site of interdisciplinary engagement at the intersection of Black studies and Black contemporary art.


DONATE TO OUR CATALOG

SUPPORT

TEAM

RESEARCH COLLECTION SERIES








Programming





UpcomingStay tuned!
Past
Book Talk for Patrice D. Douglass’s Engendering Blackness: Slavery and the Ontology of Sexual Violence; joined by Ebony Oldham and Jordan Mulkey

September 21st, 2025

Zoom



OUR RESEARCH COLLECTION SERIES





What are Research Collections?

One of the Center's most distinctive features will be its Research Collection Series: a set of curated boxes assembled by international scholars and artists. Each collection brings together ephemera, texts, and/or media that the contributor has registered as essential to their own research practice. These are paired with an anthology of the contributor's published work, offering an immersive and expansive view into their intellectual and artistic contributions to Black Studies, Afropessimism, and Slavery Studies.



Our Contributors


Patrice D. Douglass


Dr. Douglass is an Assistant Professor in Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley. She holds a PhD and MA in Culture and Theory from the University of California, Irvine, a MA in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Riverside, and a BA in Feminist Studies and Legal Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Her first book project, Engendering Blackness: The Ontology of Sexual Violence, examines the relationship between sexual violence and modern racial slavery and finds it not only inseverable but also fundamental to the structural predicaments facing Blackness in the present. By interrogating the sexual status of the slave, Engendering Blackness contends that the sexual violability of slaves is often misappropriated by frameworks on sexual violence-such as those espoused by feminist philosophy and feminist legal theory-that privilege its occurrences as a question of ethics, power, and feminine orders of gendering. Rather, this book foregrounds Blackness as engendered by sexual violence, which forcefully (re) produces Blackness, corporeally and conceptually, as a condition that lacks the capacity to ontologically distinguish its suffering from what it means to “be” Human.


Patrick Teed

Teed is an interdisciplinary scholar working within the theoretical humanities. Broadly speaking, his scholarship focuses on: Black critical theory; psychoanalysis; racial slavery and abolitionism; continental philosophy; and science and technology studies. His available essays can be found in: differences, CR: New Centennial Review, Rhizomes, TOPIA, and Lateral and he guest edited the special issue “Care and Cure” for TOPIA focusing on Black critical theoretical approaches to the titular keywords. He is currently at work on his first book project, Deconstructing Life: Epigenesis, Antiblackness, which interrogates the racism structural to critical theory’s enchantment with postgenomic science.
His research has been generously supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Ontario Graduate Scholarship, the University of Toronto, and York University.

In addition to his scholarship, Patrick is a playwright, dramaturg, and cultural worker. He has developed plays including Visiting My Mother and Other Repetition Compulsions, Uninvited Guests, Meat(less) Loaf, and It’s a Beautiful Day for Brunch and to Arrest the Cops That Killed Breonna Taylor with Afterlife Theatre, a company he founded with his collaborator Carly Billings. This work has been funded by the Ontario Arts Council, Hamilton City Enrichment Fund, and Hamilton Festival Theatre Company.

Ebony Oldham

Ebony Renae Oldham (they/them) is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Gender Studies and former co-chair of the Black Feminism Initiative at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Their dissertation, provisionally titled “Unfit for Life, If Not Death First,” engages transatlantic slavery and its carceral afterlife with a focus on the entanglements between antiblackness, antifatness, and ableism.

Oldham holds a B.A. in Ethnic Studies from the University of Oregon and a minor in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, a Master’s in Education from Portland State University with a Graduate Certificate in Gender, Race, and Nations, and a Master’s in Gender Studies from UCLA.

Ebony’s research foci on Black feminist theory, Black critical theory, political theory, historiography, abolitionisms, and philosophies of un/gendering are featured in or are forthcoming in TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Journal of African American Studies, and an edited chapter in Fat Performance with Intellect Books.

Among their research awards and fellowships, some include the Dissertation Year Fellowship (2025), Jean Stone Dissertation Award (2025), Intersections of Carceral Studies and Black Studies Residency Award (2025), Race and Digital Justice Fellowship (2025 and 2024), Institute of American Cultures Graduate and Predoctoral Fellowship with the Bunche Center for African American Studies (2024), Keck Humanistic Inquiry Research Award (2024), Eugene V. Cota-Robles Fellowship (2024, 2020), Emerge Fellowship and Residency with the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability Fellowship (2023), Graduate Summer Research Mentorship Fellowship (2023, 2021) Alisa Bierria Black Feminism Initiative Fellowship (2022), Black Feminist Interdisciplinary Graduate Research Grant (2022), and 100 Influential Women & Non-Binary Femmes Award with the Women’s Foundation of Oregon (2019).

Jordan Mulkey

Jordan Mulkey is a doctoral candidate in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. Previously, he was a Mellon Cluster Fellow in Critical Theory at Northwestern University, where he received his M.A. in African American Studies in 2022. In 2018, he was recognized as an “Intellectual of The Year” at Morehouse College, where he received his B.A. in English with honors the following year. His research interests broadly engage German idealism, psychoanalysis, queer theory, aesthetic philosophy, black political theology, and the sexual afterlives of slavery. He is currently at work on his dissertation, “Dispiriting the Dark: Eros and Ecstasy in Black Live Art”, which examines the racial unconscious of erotic representation disclosed in queer afro-diasporic aesthetic strategies hostile to the concepts of love and pleasure.

Cecilio M. Cooper

Cooper’s research has been previously supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Antiquarian Society, John Carter Brown Library, Yale Center for British Art, and Folger Shakespeare Library, among others. By examining the visual and material cultures of alchemy and demonology, their first book manuscript unconventionally examines the occulted roles blackness and darkness play in cosmological constitutions of subsurface space. They completed a PhD with distinction in black studies and a graduate certificate in critical theory from Northwestern University.

Sara-Maria Sorentino

Sorentino is an Associate Professor of Gender & Race Studies at the University of Alabama. Her research and teaching excavate philosophical connections between anti-black violence, real abstraction, and social reproduction, focusing on the methodological and political challenges involved in routing German Idealism and Marxism through the problem of slavery. She has articles published with Rhizomes, Theory & Event, International Labor and Working-Class History, Antipode, Postmodern Culture, Telos, differences, Emancipations, The Comparatist, Political Theology, Law Text Culture, Qui Parle, and Society and Space. She is currently working on two books, tentatively entitled Voluntary Slavery: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Ontology (with Tapji Garba), which fashions a new genealogy of will, slavery, and theology, and With What Must Slavery Begin?, which mines the limits of Hegelian-Marxist methods to re-read the problem of racial blackness in the historiography of slavery.


Tapji Garba

Garba is a PhD student in Social and Political Thought at York University. Their research engages political theology, legal history, and political economy from within the field of Black studies. Garba is the author of On Materialism, Freedom, and Self-consciousness published with Philosophy Today and has co-authored two articles with Sara-Maria Sorentino, Slavery is a Metaphor: A Critical Commentary on Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor” with Antipode and Blackness Before Race and Race as Reoccupation: Reading Sylvia Wynter with Hans Blumenberg through Political Theology.