Dr. Cathy Thomas, Assistant Professor with UC Santa Barbara’s English Department, is a creative writer and scholar invested in womanist and black feminist pedagogy, practice, critique, and play. She studies Afrodiasporic Literature across genres, especially speculative fiction, Caribbean literature & culture, comic books, and science & technology studies. Her work agitates against androcentric modernity and antiblack humanism. She received her Ph.D. in Literature from the University of California at Santa Cruz and her MFA from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Prior to academia, she worked in a genetics lab, at a neuropsychiatric center focused on mindfulness, in Hollywood, and on HIV clinical research.