Amon Pierson is a doctoral student in the Department of English. Amon’s broad research interests include contemporary black poetics, psychoanalysis, and black critical theory. Prior to entering Princeton, he received a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude, from Emory University. While at Emory, Amon wrote an Honors thesis titled “Reading the Hieroglyph: the Em Dash in Action,” which discusses the existence of black women within the American Symbolic through integrating Lacanian psychoanalysis with readings of Bessie Mears’ death in Richard Wright’s Native Son and Toi Derricotte’s poem “On the Turning Up of Unidentified Black Female Corpses.” Amon will produce a dissertation that is a study of the antiblack violence that is visited upon blacks at the hands of the Political. This project seeks to notice and ponder the ways in which antiblack violence is a harrowing phenomenon that permeates through black “life.” It questions the essence of black life, given the ubiquity of death and antiblack violence that defines blackness.