Tyler Denmead researches and writes about youth, arts, culture, and race, with a particular focus on whiteness. His educational inquiry crosses several fields, including visual art education, art history, cultural studies, and critical race and ethnic studies, and is informed by his prior work as a community-based arts educator and occasional artist/performer. His book, The Creative Underclass: Youth, Race, and the Gentrifying City (Duke University Press, 2019) is an ethnographic examination of how youth creatively and culturally respond to racialising discourses of "troubled youth" that have been central to state-led creative urban gentrification schemes. His current book project is a critical examination of anti-racist reading practices, with a particular focus on a 2021 British legal case in which a White nationalist, convicted of possessing information useful to plotting a terrorist attack, was sentenced to reading canonical English literature. He is the founding executive director of New Urban Arts in Providence, Rhode Island, USA. In 2019, students at Cambridge voted him the Best Lecturer at the University of Cambridge. In 2021, he received a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship.

Critical Youth Studies American Studies Cultural Studies British Cultural Studies Critical Race and Ethnicity Studies Critical Race Theory, particularly Critical Whiteness Studies Black Feminisms Artistic, literary, ethnographic, and cultural methods of analysis

Fellow and Director of Studies, Education at Queens' College Editorial Review Board, Studies in Art Education Steering Committee, Art Education Research Institute Member of National Society for Education in Art and Design (member of Anti-Racist Art Education Action Group)