• Endia Louise Hayes
  • Endia Louise Hayes
  • Curriculum Vitae
  • Endia Louise Hayes is a PhD Candidate whose work sits at the intersections of sensory sociology, feminist theory, and cultural studies. Hayes studies the ways Black Southern peoples create knowledge with a specific focus on im/possibilities of epistemology emerging from and alongside the Black body. She is currently working on her dissertation, entitled “The Six Senses: A Comparative Study of Afro-Texan Femme Sensorial Epistemologies.” Keeping in mind the historical, social and political formations of ‘Blackness’ written onto the Afro-Texan femme bodies, this dissertation moves to the interiorities, or what she denotes as sensorial epistemologies, haunting – the sixth sense – creates.

    Alongside research, Endia’s teaching pedagogy is impacted by her mentoring HBCU, BIPOC, and Rutgers students through programs such as Institute for the Recruitment of Teachers (IRT), UNCF/Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF), and Rutgers Bridge 2 Doctorate Program. By critically engaging namely decolonial feminist genealogies of knowledge production in the classroom, she introduces students to the value, creativity, and rigor of studying theory and its praxes throughout the social.

    Endia’s work can be found in Southern Cultures, Gastronomica (co-authored with Norah MacKendrick), Black Perspectives, and Environmental History Now (EHN). She also has chapters in anthologies Black Feminist Sociology and Black Women and da ‘Rona (forthcoming). She has shared her work at the American Sociological Association (ASA), Association for Black Sociologists (ABS), American Studies Association (ASA), African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS), and the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis (RCHA). Endia is a 2022-2023 Advanced Doctoral Student Fellow at the Center for Black, Brown and Queer Studies (BBQ+), a Rutgers Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (RASTL) fellow, and a former 2021-2022 Rutgers PreDoctoral Leadership Development Academy fellow. She holds a M.A. in Sociology from Rutgers University, and a B.A. in Sociology & Anthropology from Spelman College.