Starting Fall 2025, Dr. Horsley will be on sabbatical
Dr. M. Nicole Horsley is an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary scholar specializing in Africana Studies, Black feminist theory, and the intersections of aesthetics, science, technology, and cultural production. Their work examines racialized and gendered iconographies through critical frameworks of artificial intelligence, visual culture, sexuality, sensory perception, and metaphysics, engaging with artificial intelligence, medical technologies, digital and sonic ecologies as sites of inquiry into Black embodiment, memory, and speculative futures.
As an Associate Professor and African Diaspora Studies Coordinator , Dr. Horsley brings a commitment to community-centered learning, radical care, and transformative justice into their teaching. They have developed courses such as Race and Artificial Intelligence , Black Horror Tradition , Black Sexual Futures , and Sex, Race & Technology. Their practice-based research interrogates the politics of pleasure, perversion, chronic illness, and excess while exposing systemic inequalities.
Currently, Dr. Horsley is completing their book manuscript, which theorizes voids as sites of abjection, pleasure, and potential within Black holes and voids located through the diabetic body, death, prosthetics, posthumanism, and the erotic. Critically examining the body, memory, refusal, and the speculative in an era of increasing automation and surveillance.
Their scholarship has been featured in The Black Scholar , Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies II , Venti Journal , and other publications. A frequent invited speaker, Dr. Horsley lectures on AI, Black metaphysics, race and medicine, chronic illness, Black women's studies, and radical aesthetics. They were previously a Distinguished Visiting Scholar Fellow at the University at Buffalo in the Department of Africana and American Studies.
Education:
University of California, Los Angeles
Claremont Graduate University
Indiana University, Bloomington
She was born and raised in South Central Los Angeles, California.