Vaughn Rasberry earned a B.A. in English from Howard University and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Chicago. Compelled by C. L. R. James’s dictum that “Black Studies is the study of Western civilization,” he began his graduate career studying the European Enlightenment, the novel, and philosophical theories of modernity. His early doctoral work centered on theories of the “state of nature” in the early liberal tradition (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau) and their relation to colonialist discourse and the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel. He suspended this project, however, to pursue his current research interest in African American intellectual culture and the Cold War. Rethinking the historiography of the Cold War from an anticolonial perspective, his dissertation delineates how black writers imagine the crucial historical markers—the discourse of “totalitarianism,” the erosion of Jim Crow and European colonial regimes, the emergence of the Third World, the phenomenon of mass violence—defining the global postwar order.
He spent the 2008-09 academic year as a Fulbright lecturer at the Humboldt University Berlin.