Charles Athanasopoulos ("Dr. A") is a writer and teacher currently serving as Assistant Professor of Black Rhetoric & Popular Culture at The Ohio State University.

In Poetics of Negation (manuscript-in-progress), Athanasopoulos performs “archipelagic thinking” – an orientation toward fragmented knowledges and the fracturing of universalist (“continental”) philosophies – through an analysis of Afro-Puerto Rican and Greek-Roma sociality. Inspired by the Martiniquais poet/philosopher, Athanasopoulos riffs on Édouard Glissant’s imperative that “the archipelagos of the Mediterranean must encounter the archipelagos of Asia, and the archipelago of the Antilles.” He asks: What connections emerge when reading across a palimpsest of institutional and popular discourses in Puerto Rico and Greece concerning race and national identity? In what ways do these discourses also intersect with the United States either through diasporic communities or other colonial entanglements? What connections emerge when reading across a palimpsest of Afro-Puerto Rican and Greek-Roma ways of thinking-feeling-doing together?

Athanasopoulos develops the lens of “poetics of negation” by placing Édouard Glissant’s “poetics of Relation” in conversation with his own conceptual orientation previously explored in Black Iconoclasm (2024, Palgrave Macmillan). This Black iconoclastic reading of Glissant incites his archipelagic engagement with contemporary scholarship in Black study, Caribbean studies, Afro-Puerto Rican studies, and Critical Romani studies. Poetics of Negation thus takes readers through transnational and often comparative readings of Afro-Puerto Rican and Greek-Roma sociality through analyses of art, music, film, activism, and diasporic creolization. Athanasopoulos’ deeply personal and rigorous analysis ultimately offers opportunities for further fracturing Western Man and for further apprehending the poetics – new ways of thinking-feeling-doing together - which emerge alongside such negations of continental thought.

Athanasopoulos’ first book project, Black Iconoclasm: Public Symbols, Racial Progress, and Post/Ferguson America takes its name from an orientation the author unfurls across seven chapters. This orientation riffs on Frantz Fanon’s “program of complete disorder” by fracturing dominant icons of Black freedom which have emerged in post/Ferguson American culture including the call to ‘Make America Great Again’, white liberal narratives of ‘racial progress,’ and the icon of Black Lives Matter movement among leftists/radicals. In doing so, Athanasopoulos throws readers into a liminal space where their potential coordinates for defining Black liberation are disordered, inciting an engagement with different ways of thinking/being/relating which emerge in their wake. Athanasopoulos demonstrates that practice through the layout of the project itself and by highlighting various iterations of Black iconoclasm in popular culture. Black Iconoclasm is the winner of the 2025 Cultural Studies Association First Book Prize & the 2025 Critical and Cultural Studies Division Book of the Year Award from the National Communication Association.

As an advocate, Athanasopoulos co-founded the Puerto Rican Independence Party’s (PIP) diasporic Washington State chapter & spent two years serving as President of PIP-WA. As of Spring 2025, he became an Associate Member of the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC). In March 2025, he co-founded the CCAC (Columbus Community Abolition Collective) - a monthly reading and discussion-based group on prison abolition - alongside Dr. V.N. Trinh and Dr. Corinne Mitsuye Sugino.