Biography
Antron D. Mahoney is Assistant Professor of African American Studies at the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina. He is the first person to complete a PhD in Pan-African Studies from the University of Louisville, where he also earned a Graduate Certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies.
Antron grew up in Bishopville, SC, where he thrived in performing arts and academic programs within school and in the community. He found performing arts to be not only a creative and intellectual outlet, but a means for exploring and expressing his burgeoning queer identity—and later, these elements would be essential to his formulation of a black queer praxis and politics.
Antron would go on to attend Bethune-Cookman College, in part due to his interest in music and performance, but ultimately earned a bachelor’s degree in business education, followed by a master’s degree in higher education from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG). While at Bethune-Cookman, he discovered a passion for education and an interest in college student engagement, which led him to consider a career in higher education student affairs.
Once graduating from UNCG, Antron worked in student affairs for eight years in various capacities, including student housing, community engagement, leadership development, and social justice education. His latest role was Assistant Director of the Center for Leadership and Social Change at Florida State University, where he was a member of the department’s senior leadership team, responsible for department management as well as implementing campus programs and policies relating to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Subsequently, Antron’s experience in student affairs compelled him to pursue a PhD to examine issues of race, gender, sexuality, and institutionality—conceptualized broadly through the framework of embodiment and freedom.
Specifically, Antron investigates the intersections of social movements and theories of race, gender, and sexuality to respond to two general questions. First, how do people of African descent come to conceptualize and materialize gendered bodies through political, social, and institutional emancipatory struggles? Second, what are the interrelated effects of those bodily conceptions and materializations on liberatory practice?
Stemming from his dissertation, Antron’s current research project explores gender and sexuality formation in black Greek-lettered organizations (BGLOs) and higher education. As a queer of color critique, this study is one of the first to center the lives and experiences of black queer fraternal members to call into question normalized constructs of black gender performance, politics, and subjectivity.
Antron has held faculty positions at Ohio Wesleyan University and Davidson College as well as held administrative roles at Southern Methodist University in addition to Florida State University. He has served as a co-lead facilitator for LeaderShape, and he has work published in books and journals such as, the Journal of Leadership Studies, the International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, and the Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class. He has also received such honors and recognition as the Ohio Wesleyan University Bishop Francis Emner Kearns Faculty of the Year Award, Bethune-Cookman University 40 Under 40 Alumni Award, and National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA) of Florida Mid-Manager of the Year, among others.