Pheolyn Allen

Professional Bio

Pheolyn Allen is dual-titled PhD student in English and African American and Diaspora Studies at Penn State. They hold a BA in Media Arts from the University of North Texas, where they served as an instructor for the UNT Youth Media Lab, educating marginalized communities and foster youth in media pedagogy and filmmaking techniques. From 2021-2024 they worked with Penn State’s Center for Black Digital Research, serving as a creative producer and director for their various media and broadcasting projects, such as their annual Douglass Day Transcribe-A-Thon. In summer 2023, Pheolyn worked as a Junior Fellow with the American Archive of Public Broadcasting at the Library of Congress. During their tenure, they curated the public-facing, digital exhibit The Odyssey of Black Studies in Public Broadcasting which examines the rich history of the Black Studies movement, from its inception with the student strikes at San Francisco State University in 1968, to Black Studies celebrating its fifty-year anniversary in 2019.

Pheolyn's writing and scholarship primarily centers Afrofuturism, 20th and 21st century African American and African Diasporic Literature, Black Power, Queer Theory, Queer of Color Critique, Performance Studies, and Media studies. In particular, they look at the politics of Black liberation and decolonial movements across the African Diaspora and their influence on the narrative practices of Black speculative writers as they visualize future formations of Black freedom.