Brett St Louis

Brett St Louis joined the department in October 2024 as Senior Research Fellow. He previously worked at Goldsmiths, University of London, University of California, San Diego and the University of Bristol. Brett is also a member of the Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity and a member of the editorial board of New Formations.

Brett gained his PhD in sociology from the University of Southampton in 1999. His thesis on race, modernity and revolution in C.L.R. James' social theory and activist practice drew on 9 months of archival research undertaken in the US. This work was subsequently published as Rethinking Race, Politics and Poetics: C.L.R. James' Critique of Modernity (Routledge, 2007).

Brett’s research centres on the sociology of ethnicity, race and racism, specifically theoretical analyses of the relationship between de/racialization and antiracism. He is currently completing a book for Princeton University Press provisionally entitled The Postracial Ambition: Eradicating Race, Challenging Racism. This project constructs a genealogy of racial eliminativism, charting its development from the late eighteenth century to the present. The book also develops a critical analysis of epistemological, methodological, ontological, ethical and political arguments for the elimination of race. Brett’s research has also applied this racial eliminativist theoretical approach to debates on the salience of BAME as an administrative and analytical category designed to aggregate minority ethnic people’s experiences of racism.

Brett is also interested in the philosophical and methodological formations of race. He develops this concern in relation to contemporary forms of molecular racialization and theorizing race as technology, instead of viewing race as an empirical object subject to technological intervention.