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Lives and works in New York, NY

Born in London, UK

EDUCATION

Ph.D., Yale University

M.Phil., Yale University

M.A., Yale University

A.B., Princeton University

ACADEMIC POSITIONS

Associate Professor, Hunter College, CUNY (2023-present)

Assistant Professor, Cornell University (2018-2023)

Postdoctoral Research Associate, Johns Hopkins University (2022)

Postdoctoral Research Associate, Leiden University, Netherlands (2019)

Postdoctoral Research Associate, New York University (2016-2018)

Postdoctoral Research Associate, Princeton University (2015-2016)

 

SERVICE

Creative Technology Labs Founded

Executive Director, Afro-Asia Group

Founder, Dark Laboratory

Co-Founder, a Mellon Foundation initiative for Black feminist technologies

Publishing and Editorial Positions

Editor, Public Books, Global Black History and Theory

Editorial Board, Trans Asia Photography Journal (Duke University Press)

Editorial Board, Refract: A Visual Studies Journal (UC, Santa Cruz)

Editorial Board, Regenerations: A Climate Journal (Rutgers)

   

National, Executive and Advisory Boards + Elected Positions

Boys Club of New York, Professional Advisory Council

Board Member, National Board of Directors, Association of Asian American Yale Alumni (AAAYA)

Finance Committee, Executive Board, American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA)

Executive Committee, Visual Cultures, Modern Language Association (MLA)

Nominating Committee, American Studies Association (ASA)

Member, Linnaean Society   

Awards

Artist-in-Residence, Columbia University Climate School, 2022-2024.

Outstanding Article Prize of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora, for “Sugarwork: The Gastropoetics of Afro-Asia After the Plantation,” 2021.

Toni Cade Bambara Best Article Prize, Black Women’s Studies Association, for “Chop Suey Surplus: Chinese Food, Sex, and the Political Economy of Afro-Asia,” 2021.

Artist-in-Residence, University of Connecticut, Fall 2021.

Fermentologist-in-Residence, University of California, San Diego, 2021-2022.

Grants

Carr Center Racial Justice Fellowship in Human Rights, Harvard University, September 2024 ($10,000).

Society for the Humanities, Cornell University, January 2023.

Botanical Storytelling, Columbia University World Projects, Project Team, 2022-2024 ($50,000)

Mellon Foundation, Higher Learning, Humanities Grant ($2 million)

National Endowment for the Humanities / AHRC, New Directions ($100,000)

IAAS Fellowship, Leiden University, Netherlands

Radical Collaboration, CIVIC, Cornell University ($20,000)

Classroom Technology Grant, Center for Teaching Innovation Cornell University ($1,500)

National Endowment for the Humanities, Summer Institute for Caribbean Digital Humanities, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida

C.V. Starr Research Travel Grant, Suriname, Asian/Pacific/American Institute, New York University

Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition Graduate Fellowship, Travel Grant, Yale University

A. Bartlett Giamatti Fellowship in the Humanities, Yale University

COURSES

Hunter College, CUNY

African Caribbean Literature

Black and Indigenous Ecologies and Technologies

Afro-Asia: Food, Futurism, and Feminisms

Cornell University

Black and Indigenous Metropolitan Ecologies (Architecture)

sound x color: electronic music and technologies of empire (Cornell Tech)

The Politics and Ethics of Citation

Afro-Asia: Food, Futurism, and Feminisms

Archipelagoes: Cartographies of Race, Sound, and Sexuality

New York University, Faculty Teaching Fellowship

Chinatown: Havana, Kingston, NYC

The Darker Nations: Afro-Asian Cultures

20th/21st Century African American Literature

Caribbean Writing, Reggae, and Routes

Princeton University

Islands in the Sun: Caribbean Literature

PEER-REVIEWED JOURNAL ARTICLES

  1. “Radio Silence: World War II and Military Technologies ” Sound Carries, Social Text, Duke University Press,  2024, (forthcoming).

  2. “Not Another Lab: The Forever Crisis of Collaboration in the Humanities” ASAP/Journal, May 2023,

  3. “Dirge: Black and Indigenous Hemispheric Burial, a Sound Sculpture,” ASAP / Journal, 2022.

  4. “The World We Became: MapQuest 2350: A Speculative Design Digital Atlas Beyond Climate Crisis,” Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures in the Americas, 2022.

  5. “Stolen Life, Stolen Time: Black Temporality and Racial Capitalism as Speculation,” South Atlantic Quarterly, January 2022. On Black Temporality and Crisis.

  6. “I’m New Here: Black and Indigenous Media Ecologies,” Refract: A Visual Studies Journal.

  7. “Unmapping the Caribbean: Toward a Digital Praxis of Archipelagic Sounding,” archipelagoes, Small Axe, December 2020.

  8. “Bigger than the Sound: Jamaican Chinese Infrastructure of Reggae," Small Axe, November 2020.

  9. “Chop Suey Surplus: Chinese Food, Sex, and the Political Economy of Afro-Asia,” Women & Performance: A Journal in Feminist Theory, August 2020.

  10. "‘Guano in their destiny’: Race, Geology, and a Philosophy of Indenture," Amerasia Journal, June 2019.

  11. “Sugarwork: The Gastropoetics of Afro-Asia After the Plantation,” Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, April, 2019.

  12. "Albums of Inclusion: The Photographic Poetics of Caribbean Chinese Visual Kinship," Small Axe, 56, July 2018.

  13. “007 versus the Darker Races: Black and Yellow Peril in Dr. No,” Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, 2015.

  14. “Intimate Occupations: The Afterlife of the ‘Coolie’” Transforming Anthropology, 22 (1), 2014.

ESSAYS, CHAPTERS, ART CRITICISM

“Doth Suffer A Sea Change: The Underwater Ecologies of Transatlantic Witness,” Interspecies Future: A Primer, 2024.

“Black Geological Thought, ”Black Environmentalisms, Duke University Press,  2025, (forthcoming).

“Sound as Method in Caribbean Geography,” Black Island Geographies, Routledge, 2024. (forthcoming).

“Unraveling the Map,” Asian American Art Roundtable, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures in the Americas, 2023.

“Afro-Asian Feminist Art: Futurist Genealogies,” Asia Art Archive, October 2022.

“Silence as Fermentation: Listening Underwater,” Shift Space, (March 2022).

“The Poetics of Afro-Asian Cuisine,” “Recipe for Vegan Jamaican Patties,” Black Food, ed. Bryant Terry, October 2021.

“Andrea Chung’s Ornate Collages Defy the Colonial Gaze by Celebrating Black Women’s Friendships,” Artsy, October 2021.

“Sounding South Asian, Sounding Black: The Sonic Politics of Appreciation or Appropriation,” Black Perspectives, AAIHS, October 2021.

“Scratching the Photograph’s Surface: An Afro-Chinese Woman in 1950s London,” The Other Windrush, Pluto Press, June 2021. 

“On Being Prone in the Archive: Black British Erotic Power and Sexual Healing,” Inward Outward, National Archives of the Netherlands, December 10, 2020.

“Human Resources: Art’s History and the Ecology of Black Extraction,” British Art Studies, Yale Center for British Art and the Paul Mellon Centre, November 30, 2020

Global Debt Syllabus, “Debt Peonage and Prisons,” Contributor, Columbia University, 2020.

Exhibition Review of “Relational Undercurrents, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, April 2019.

“Entangled Genealogies of Women’s Work,” Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, exhibition catalogue, Women’s Work, Pen and Brush, April 2019.

“Dress-Up Play,” essay on the Photography of Ming Smith, as part of the exhibition Race, Art, Myth, and Justice, CCADI, November 2018- June 2019.

Caribbean Debt Syllabus, “Intimate Bonds and Bonded Labor: Indenture and Debt Peonage in the Caribbean,” #NoMoreDebt, Contributor, Unit 4, October 2018.

Review of Wildlife of the Caribbean, Caribbean Quarterly, March 2018.

Biography entry, “Albert Chong,” Dictionary of Afro-Caribbean and Latin American Biography, Oxford University Press, 2016.

Thrice Diasporized: Caribbean Chinese Diasporic Literature” Small Axe Salon, March 2014.

“The Photograph as Flesh: The Circuits of Black Pacific Kinship,” On Being Adjacent to Violence, ed. Irene Kacadenes, De Gruyter, 2021.

JOURNALISM

“To Read bell hooks is Love Her,” Vulture, New York Magazine, December 17, 2021.

Re-reading bell hooks as a ritual of radical mourning, gal-dem, December 18, 2021.

“Lauryn Hill: A Draft for Revolution,” The Funambulist, September 3, 2021.

“The DJ is a Time Machine,” Public Books, October 29, 2020.

“Kitchen Marronage and Jerk in Jamaica,” The Funambulist, September 3, 2020.

“Who Inherits?: A Conversation Between Tao Leigh Goffe and Hazel Carby, Public Books, February 3, 2020.

“Identity, Islands, and Hazel V. Carby: A Mixtape,” Public Books, February 3, 2020.

“The Precarity of Black Motherhood,” Boston Review, August 9, 2019.

"Black Head of Merrill Lynch Forced to Resign," Afro, November 8, 2007.

BOOKS

BOOKS

For more on Tao’s forthcoming books DARK LABORATORY (Doubleday, Penguin Books UK, January 2025) and BLACK CAPITAL, CHINESE DEBT (Duke University Press) see the Books section of this website. Below click for links to book featuring chapters and recipes by Dr. Goffe.