Ainsley LeSure is the Richard and Edna Salomon Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Brown University. She received her Ph. D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 2015, She is a contemporary political theorist who focuses on the critical theory of race and racism, phenomenology, democracy, and feminist theory.

Her first book, Locating Racism in the World (Oxford, 2026) develops a phenomenological theory of antiblack racism as a reality-violating common sense, generated and perfected through racist practices that produce a white, antiblack world. This project critically engages post-Civil Rights understandings of antiblack racism and black studies’ recent pessimism about politics as an effective means to pursue black freedom.

She is currently working on a second book manuscript, “The Tricky Business of the Human Question,” which explores the possibilities of universal humanism as a political and ethical aspiration by disentangling it from its assumed antiblackness. The project does this by critically engaging nearly thirty-years of scholarship generated by contemporary critical theorists of performance, film, aesthetics, and literary criticism in black studies who trace their mandate back to Frantz Fanon, Hortense Spillers, and Sylvia Wynter and exploring the relationship between black studies and Western political thought.

Before joining Brown University, Ainsley was an assistant professor of politics at Occidental College and a post-doctoral fellow at the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago. Her research has been funded by the Institute for Citizens and Scholars and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University.