Ashley Dawson is Professor of Postcolonial Studies in the English Department at the College of Staten Island and at the Graduate Center / City University of New York. His latest books include People’s Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons (O/R, 2020), Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change (Verso, 2017), and Extinction: A Radical History (O/R, 2016). An anti-pipeline activist with the No North Brooklyn Pipeline campaign, a member of Public Power NY, and the founder of the CUNY Climate Action Lab, he is a long-time climate justice activist. He is currently at work on a book entitled Environmentalism from Below, and is co-editing a volume called Decolonize Conservation!
Degrees
BA, University of the South
MA, University of Virginia
PhD, Columbia University
• Mongrel Nation: Diasporic Culture and the Making of Postcolonial Britain (Michigan, 2007)
• Co-editor, Democracy, the State, and the Struggle for Global Justice (Routledge, 2009)
• Co-editor, Dangerous Professors: Academic Freedom and the National Security Campus (Michigan, 2009)
• Co-editor, Exceptional State: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the New Imperialism (Duke, 2007)
• Editor, “Imperial Ecologies,” new formations 69 (2010)
• Co-Editor, “The Perils of Academic Freedom,” Social Text 90 (Summer 2007).
• Co-Editor, “Global Cities of the South,” Social Text 81 (Winter 2004).
• Dr. Dawson has published articles in journals such as African Studies Review, Atlantic Studies, Cultural Critique, Interventions, Jouvert, Postcolonial Studies, Postmodern Culture, Screen, Small Axe, and Social Text.
