Charles Athanasopoulos ("Dr. A") is a writer and teacher currently serving as Assistant Professor of Black Rhetoric & Popular Culture at The Ohio State University. He also serves as Vice President of the Cultural Studies Association. 

Utilizing rhetorical and cultural methods of analysis, his research operates at the intersection of Black study, Caribbean studies, and critical Romani studies. He asks the following questions: What social codes are imposed on Black and Roma people? What exceeds that imposition, and how do we resist it? What connections might be made across various dispossessed groups in such resistance? And how can we think reflexively about the constraints of even our most radical blueprints of liberation? 

In responding to these questions, Dr. A has developed an original concept of “Black iconoclasm” (2024) as a practice/method of Black radical discernment for navigating the post-Ferguson American context & re-thinking even our most cherished blueprints about Black liberation. He offers innovative concepts such as an "iconoclastic genealogy" of Black Lives Matter, "Black radical discernment" as a process of Black study, "Fanonian slips" which emerge within communicative situations, "iconoclastic readings" of film, and original analysis of BLM graffiti/murals as reflecting a "poetics of visual relation." He also innovates the form of academic monographs by interspersing a Fanon-inspired allegory Black Icarus in between traditional chapters.

His second in-progress book project, tentatively titled Race After Diversity: A Poetics of Negation, pushes against the grain of contemporary discourses surrounding diversity, identity, and diaspora. Beginning in Queens, NY — the most diverse ethnic and linguistic urban area in the world —this book travels to Puerto Rico and Greece to explore inter-connections between Afro-Caribbean and Roma-European sociality. His original reading braids a theoretical engagement with the concept of creolization (unpredictable contact/mixture) together with a deep consideration of the particular contexts surrounding resistance to anti-Blackness, anti-Roma racism, and the colonization of Puerto Rico.

Dr. A also currently co-facilitate the Columbus Community Abolition Collective (CCAC), the Black Rhetoric and Culture Collective (BRCC), and engages with both the Puerto Rican independence movement and the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture.