Amor Kohli is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of African and Black Diaspora Studies at DePaul. He received his PhD at Tufts University and taught at Tufts, Middlebury College, and the University of Vermont before joining DePaul in 2003 as one of the first two faculty hired in the African and Black Diaspora Studies Program. Under his leadership, the Program gained Department status in 2017.
His research and teaching interests include Literatures of the Black Diaspora, Black musical expression, the intersection between Black music and other areas of expression (literature, performance, visual art, politics).
Classes he has taught at DePaul include: Black Music in American Culture; Harlem Renaissance and Négritude; Langston Hughes; Chicago's Black Cultural Renaissance; Jazz in the Diasporic Imagination; African America: Ideas, Peoples, Cultures, Movements; Black Aesthetic Thought; Jazz and the Novel; Pan-Africanism; Race and Ethnicity in Literary Studies
Kohli's publications include scholarly essays on Black writers published in the journals Callaloo, MELUS, African Identities, and Journal of Commonwealth Literature. His work has also appeared in a number of edited collections, including Beat Drama: Playwrights and Performances of the “Howl" Generation, The Black Imagination, Science Fiction, and the Speculative, and Reconstructing the Beats. Kohli is also one of the editors of the book Uprooting Urban America: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Race, Class, and Gentrification.