Kevin Rigby Jr.

Kevin Rigby Jr. is Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Associate and 2026 College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Emerging Scholar in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign. A scholar of Black political philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, his work examines the meaning (and the meaning made) of Black protest in the twenty-first century and the relationship of blackness to political possibility and imagination more broadly. He earned his BA in African American Studies from Wayne State University, after which he completed a post-baccalaureate research fellowship (ESI PREP) in African American Studies at Yale University, before earning his MA and PhD in African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

His book project, tentatively titled Black Protest at the Limits of the Political traces a seemingly intransigent aporia at the heart of black political ontology: blackness names a limit to political intelligibility, not an identity or position, but which cannot be fully rendered within political, moral, or social frames. Through a psychoanalytic and philosophical engagement with contemporary black protest, particularly the Black Lives Matter movement, and the history of urban rebellions more broadly, the book traces the ways that traditions of black political philosophy, and interpretative practices used by activists, scholars, and media to make black revolt legible to political rationality and solidarity, frequently circumscribe what our understanding of black politics and protest can offer to political thinking. By working at this limit of the political, the book aims to offer a psycho-political theory of blackness that moves past the present impasse in political discourse that struggles to generate compelling analysis of racial identity, politics, and power adequate to contemporary crises. 

Dr. Rigby’s first peer-reviewed article, "What Does Black Protest Appear to Be?" published in Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, received an Honorable Mention for the Faculty Prize for Research in the Humanities from the Humanities Research Institute at University of Illinois, and in 2026, he was named one of two University of Illinois College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Emerging Scholars. His second book project for which initial research is underway, Theory in Public (working title), revisits scholarly debates concerning theoretical traditions in Black Studies (i.e. Barbara Christian's The Race for Theory), to think about the unique capacity of theory in Black Studies to "do" things in politics and culture, broadly construed. In addition to his scholarship, Dr. Rigby has been profiled in outlets such as Ebony and the Detroit Free Press and is an experienced community, electoral, and labor organizer, including co-founding the Detroit chapter of Black Youth Project 100 and organizing gig workers with SEIU 1021 in the San Francisco Bay Area.