Dr. Drake applies anti-disciplinary approaches to questions of time, space and memory in relation to configurations of Blackness. He studies these and other processes of racial formation through a series of productions, ranging from accumulative (capitalism), artistic (the blues) and affiliative (kin patterns). These questions pulsate throughout Dr. Drake’s current book manuscript, tentatively titled "Angels of Angola: Fascism and Slavery in the Deep South," which builds upon the oeuvre of George Jackson to examine emergent forms of fascism and slavery in the southern US through the prism of a prison and plantation. His future research endeavors will probe similar but distinct lines of inquiry by considering the currents, cultures, politics and possibilities for Black people living and dying amid the throes of anti-Black regimes of dispossession alongside the Mississippi River. Dr. Drake’s pedagogical profile reflects the rigor of his scholarship, teaching courses on Black history, the blues, slavery and abolition.

Prior to the professoriate, Dr. Drake worked as an archivist and librarian in multiple institutional and non-institutional contexts, most meaningfully with A People’s Archive of Police Violence in Cleveland and Documenting the Now. He was born and raised in Gary, Indiana where he graduated from The Benjamin Banneker Achievement Center.