Christopher S. Chambers is the Associate Director of the Institute for Black Intellectual and

Cultural Life at Dartmouth College. His scholarship employs intersectional frameworks to

analyze how race, gender, and sexuality shape individual and collective Black identities within

systems structured by white supremacy. Across his body of work, he traces the strategies of

Black agency and identity formation that emerge in settings that have historically marginalized Black queer life— from the Black Church to families and communities. Centering the experiences of Black gay men, he examines how individuals navigate what he terms the “paradox of belonging,” undertaking creative cultural labor to sustain communal ties while asserting queer selfhood. Integrating structural analyses of racial power with attention to the fluid performances of sexuality, Dr. Chambers’ interdisciplinary research spans the sociology of identity, race, and sexualities, public health, and social network analysis, illuminating the ideologies, tensions, and contradictions that shape Blackness as a lived, contested, and agentic experience in the contemporary United States.