Dr. Bruce has work featured or forthcoming in American Quarterly, The Black Scholar, GLQ, Oxford Bibliographies in African American Studies, Social Text, and TDR, as well as the anthologies No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies (Duke University Press) and The Mad Studies Reader (Routledge Press). Along the way, Dr. Bruce has earned grants and fellowships from Beinecke Library at Yale University, the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia, the Ford Foundation, the Fund for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale, the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Summer Institute on Tenure and Professional Advancement at Duke University. In 2018, he delivered the endowed Stirling Lecture in the Department of English at Vanderbilt University.

His debut book, How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity (Duke University Press), received the Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association. He's currently in the thick of a project on—and experiment in—the convergence of love and madness. He sometimes calls it The Afromantic.