Stephen Best is professor of English and Film & Media, and (since 2002) a member of the board of the journal Representations. 

A scholar of American and African American literature and culture, his books include None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life (Duke, 2018) and The Fugitive's Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession (Chicago, 2004). He is currently working on two projects: a book on the problem of obviousness in Black art, and another on the phenomenology of style in James Baldwin.