John Rufo

John Rufo joined the Kenyon faculty in 2024 as an assistant professor of American studies. Rufo’s research focuses on the aesthetics of social movements related to abolition, especially concerning internationalism.

Prior to Kenyon, Rufo taught at Dickinson College in American Studies, Hunter College in English and the City College of New York in Black Studies. Rufo’s teaching and research draws from several fields, especially the convergence between abolition, Black feminism, social movements and rhetorical tropes (metaphor/metonymy). The critique of racial capitalism, and the various social movements across the twentieth-century Americas engaged in this critique by way of resistant practices, is fundamental to Rufo’s work. Ongoing research has been published in Diacritics (2023) and is forthcoming in a special issue of Social Text (2025). They are revising a monograph manuscript on internationalism and abolition in addition to book-length studies of Assata Shakur’s writing and abolitionist cinema.

Rufo’s classes focus on both individual activist-thinkers, such as Angela Davis, and larger collective social movements, like the prison abolition movement, to think through historical struggles in American politics, culture and social life related to race, gender, sexuality, class and ability. Primarily, Rufo’s pedagogy focuses on collaborative reading, writing and ways of seeing, including modes counter to dominant regimes of power-knowledge and the status quo. A typical course may foreground a novel by Toni Cade Bambara, a film from Shirley Clarke, poetry by June Jordan, literary criticism by Hortense Spillers, and music featuring Archie Shepp. The classroom becomes an experimental space for rigorous discussion and creative approaches, including arts-based methods of activist endeavors. Of special interest are the emergent social actions by which change becomes possible across place. The interdisciplinary framework of American studies allows approaches to these topics from various angles, including literature, performance, legal studies, history, geography, cultural studies, the social sciences and beyond. As a teacher, Rufo is dedicated to encouraging student research and collaborating with undergraduates to assist in their own related pursuits, from local social justice activism to presentations at the American Studies Association conference.

Rufo is also a practicing poet and poetry critic. They helped found the Poetry Project Editorial Collective, publishing and editing numerous reviews of books and contemporary art in the Poetry Project Newsletter from 2017-2021. Poetry-related writing is also published with the Academy of American Poets, Ploughshares, the Capilano Review, the Poetry Foundation, and Jacket2.