Charles Athanasopoulos is a writer and teacher currently serving as Assistant Professor of Black Rhetoric & Popular Culture at The Ohio State University. Utilizing rhetorical and cultural methods of analysis, his research operates at the intersection of Black study, Caribbean studies, and critical Romani studies.

He asks the following questions: What social codes are imposed on Black and Roma people? What exceeds that imposition, and how do we resist it? What connections might be made across various dispossessed groups in such resistance? And how can we think reflexively about the constraints of even our most radical blueprints of liberation?

In responding to these questions, Athanasopoulos has developed an original concept of “Black iconoclasm” as a practice/method of Black cultural analysis which has garnered critical reception from interdisciplinary audiences across all ranks and differing theoretical dispositions. In Black Iconoclasm: Public Symbols, Racial Progress, and Post/Ferguson America (2024), he explores the development of Black Lives Matter, and the types of popular representations (positive/negative) that emerge in response, as the contextual scene for my practice. Thinking alongside Frantz Fanon’s “program of complete disorder,” he highlights various iterations of Black iconoclasm in popular culture across activism, Black radical theory, communicative situations, post-Ferguson U.S. cinema, and street art.

His second book-project-in-progress, Poetics of Negation, navigates new pathways through theories of “cimarronaje” (marronage/fugitivity) and “creolization” (cultural contact yielding unpredictable results) through a relational analysis of Afro-Puerto Rican and Greek-Roma sociality alongside a braided interrogation of Puerto Rican and Greek popular culture. This relational reading is guided by an engagement with Edouard Glissant’s remark that the archipelagoes of the Mediterranean and Caribbean should “encounter” one another, and Glissant’s own stated connections between Afro-Caribbean and European Roma peoples. Athanasopoulos contends that Poetics of Negation performs this Glissantian encounter through its relational analysis on global race, colonialism, and resistance. 

As an advocate, Athanasopoulos co-founded the Puerto Rican Independence Party’s (PIP) diasporic Washington State chapter & spent two years serving as President of PIP-WA. As of Spring 2025, he became an Associate Member of the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC). In March 2025, he co-founded the CCAC (Columbus Community Abolition Collective) - a monthly reading and discussion-based group on prison abolition - alongside Dr. V.N. Trinh and Dr. Corinne Mitsuye Sugino.