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

Athanasopoulos' current book project, tentatively titled Poetics of Negation, explores the ways of thinking/being/resisting which emanate from Afro-Puerto Rican and Greek-Roma communities across Puerto Rico, Greece, and the United States. Poetics of Negation navigates new pathways through Martiniquais philosopher Édouard Glissant’s impression that “the archipelagos of the Mediterranean must encounter the archipelagos of Asia, and the archipelago of the Antilles" through an engagement with these two seemingly disparate communities. As a descendant of both communities, Athanasopoulos' unique vantage-point yields heretofore unthought connections between anti-Black and anti-Roma violence, and between Black and Roma sociality. Poetics of Negation methodologically refuses systematic thought and disciplinary siloes by intermixing auto-ethnography alongside incisive interrogations of Puerto Rican, Greek, and U.S. popular culture (e.g. museum exhibitions, religious iconography, popular music, community festivals, graffiti/murals). Throughout, Athanasopoulos asks, How do these communities fracture Western continental thought, and what glimpses do they offer us of the possibilities beyond the current world order?

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.

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.