Tao Leigh Goffe
“When you think about Africa and Asia, and diaspora, and identity formation and who participates in the different cultures that come out of those histories and experiences — that’s a conversation we should all be having about the intimacy of globalization. It doesn’t have to exclude anyone. It’s really about inclusiveness.”
“Dark Laboratory does the gargantuan, soulful work for slowing down the velocity, scope and impact of American and European exploitation of the Caribbean. It deftly obliterates most of what I thought I knew about the Caribbean’s utility to Western wealth.”
“Mountains hold the echoes of history,” writes Goffe in the opening of a fascinating narrative that confronts the historic dynamic of climate and race in the Caribbean and examines the region as an experimental center—a “dark laboratory”—that was exploited by the greed of Western capitalists, beginning when Columbus walked ashore on the island of Guanahani in 1492. The best writing in any form leaves the reader with something to ponder, and Goffe’s criticism of, and skepticism about, nearly every aspect of Western academic assumptions concerning the climate crisis, imperialism, and race does just that.”
“In this roving, erudite debut study, Goffe, a professor of literary theory and cultural history at Hunter College, traces the attitudes and beliefs that undergird today’s climate crisis back to the racist, extractive systems of thought developed by European colonizers in previous centuries.”
Tao Leigh Goffe is a critically acclaimed writer, theorist, interdisciplinary artist, and academic who specializes in colonial histories of race, geology, climate, and media technologies. She is the author of Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis (Doubleday, 2025), which Publishers Weekly called a “scintillating study” that “bursts with keen insights and connections” in a starred review.
Her second book, Black Capital, Chinese Debt (forthcoming from Duke University Press), presents a long history of racialization, modern finance, and indebtedness. It brings together subjects of the Atlantic and Pacific markets from 1806 to the present under European colonialism. Her third book, Milk: A History and a Future (forthcoming from Doubleday), is a memoir on the intimate economics and history of American mothering, surrogate love, and breastfeeding.
She has provided screenwriting consultation for screenplays and TV show development, and has been an expert legal witness on histories of Black and Asian race relations for court cases. Her life story was featured as the subject of an episode of Hulu’s Your Attention Please: Initiative 29, a television series that celebrates Black heroes and futures on the 29th of each month.
Committed to building intellectual communities beyond institutions, Dr. Goffe is the founder of the Dark Laboratory, an engine for the study of race, technology, and ecology through digital storytelling. She is also the Executive Director of the Afro-Asia Group, an organization that centers the intersections of African and Asian diasporas, futurity, and radical coalition toward sovereignty.
Dr. Goffe studied English literature at Princeton University before earning her PhD at Yale University. Previously a fellow at the Harvard University Kennedy School for 2024-2025, she is currently in residence as a Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow for 2026-2027. She lives and works in Manhattan, where she is an Associate Professor at Hunter College, CUNY and CUNY Graduate Center in Earth and Environmental Sciences.
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