Amber Jamilla Musser is a professor of English and Africana studies at the CUNY Graduate Center.

She writes and researches at the intersections of race, sexuality, and aesthetics. In addition to writing art reviews for The Brooklyn Rail. She has published widely in queer studies, black feminism, psychoanalysis, and critical theory. She is the author of Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (NYU Press, 2014), Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (NYU Press, 2018), and Between Shadows and Noise: Sensation, Situatedness, and the Undisciplined (Duke University Press, 2024). Her collaborative projects include co-editing Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies (NYU Press, 2021) and co-hosting its accompanying podcast Feminist Keywords; special issues of Signs: A Journal of Feminist Theory on "Care and Its Complexities" and ASAP Journal on "Queer Form;" and the series Elements in Feminism and Critical Theory for Cambridge University Press. She was President of ASAP (Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present) from 2022-2023 and co-chaired ASAP-14: Arts of Fugitivity in Seattle in 2023 and ASAP-15: Not a Luxury in New York City in 2024. She is also co-Editor of Social Text.

She has an AB in Biology and History of Science from Harvard, an M.St in Women’s Studies from Oxford, and a PhD in History of Science from Harvard. She has previously taught at New York University’s Draper Program in gender politics, Brown University’s Pembroke Center for Research and Teaching on Women, Washington University in St. Louis’s Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department, and The George Washington University’s Department of American Studies.