Jasper St. Bernard

Jasper St. Bernard is a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Rhodes College. His academic work currently focuses on African American philosophy, focusing primarily on the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His recently completed dissertation explored the anti-lynching work of Ida B. Wells-Barnett. While Jasper’s work focuses on the social/political thought of black people during the lynching era, the topics he has written on have varied. For instance, in the The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Implicit Cognition (2022), he co-wrote a chapter with Dr. Shaun Gallagher, “Race and the implicit aspects of embodied social interaction,” where they explored the role the body and early childhood have in the development of one’s ‘implicit bias(es)’. He also co-wrote an article with Dr. Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson, “‘Just the Same as Fascism for Us’: The Black Panther Party’s Antifascist Thought and Praxis,” (2023) in which they examine the Party’s formulation of fascism and how that relates to discussions regarding the relationship between America and fascism that grew around 2015/2016. Jasper most recently joined a group of international thinkers and practitioners in a book project, Ubuntu: Interdisciplinary Conversations Across Continents (2023). In his contribution Jasper’s chapter, “‘To Shine the Light of Truth’: Ubuntu and the Lynching Era in America,” he argued that the frame of ubuntu can help us better understand the fracture(s) in community as manifested at a lynching site, and what continues to be at stake with the refusal of repair.