Junior Research Fellow, 2022-2024
"Queer in a Legal Sense: Brown Citizenship and Other Lawful Fictions"
Queer in a Legal Sense: Brown Citizenship and Other Lawful Fictions examines legal texts alongside literary works by queer Chicano writers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries that present more violent, often deadly, narratives of queer Chicanx...
A Reflection from an SCT Fellow When I learned that the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory would be funding my participation at this summer’s School of Criticism and Theory, I was beyond excited for the opportunity to immerse myself in critical theory while learning from scholars whose work I admire and aspire to. As a doctoral student in the School of Information Sciences, I...
Junior Research Fellow, 2018-2020 Olive Olive is a book about 21st century settler-colonialism. Specifically, it connects displacement, land conquest, and memory with the politics of everyday survival for Palestinians located in Palestine and the West, through the optic of the olive. Through multi-sited ethnography, I trace the olive from the moment it is harvested...
Senior Research Fellow, 2019-2021 "The Empire of Effects: Industrial Light and Magic and the Rendering of Realism" My book-length project on the topic of US and global special visual effects and digital moving images is historically grounded in archival research and engages with critical theories of moving image realism. The manuscript centers on global effects work in the age...
Junior Research Fellow, 2019-2021 "Medina by the Bay: An Islamic Ethics of Difference and Survival in the Bay Area Islam is often discussed as something that arrives in (and threatens) the United States from a historic and geographic elsewhere. This project examines Muslim histories from the Black Panther Party, the Nation of Islam, and 1970s counterculture, to the more recent...
Senior Research Fellow, 2016-2018 Changing Epistemologies in Contemporary Cuba: Towards a Collaborative Ethnography This study analyzes Cuban scholars' search for new modes of inquiry as they interpret increasing political, economic, and sociocultural change in their country. I focus on ethnography as a specific and flexible form of interdisciplinary, humanistic social-...
Junior Research Fellows, 2019-2021 "A Body Exposed: The Aesthetics of Sex, Death, and Mexicanness" A Body Exposed: The Aesthetics of Sex, Death, and Mexicanness contends that the representation of violence against sexual minorities is central to the construction and critique of Mexican and Latinx subject formation. By situating aesthetics, ethics, and politics in...
Senior Research Fellow, 2020-2022 "Blind Cinema: Visually Impaired Cinema and the Somatic Sensorium" My book-length project on the subject of blind and visually impaired filmmakers and their development of a particular filmic style I am calling the “blind gaze” engages with critical disability studies and phenomenological film theory. The book has two key aims: first, to...
Senior Research Fellow, 2020-2022 "The Black Pacific: The African Diaspora in South East Asia" The Black Pacific: The African Diaspora in South East Asia makes a theoretical and conceptual shift from the Black Atlantic, which is used to reconstruct, describe, and analyze the experiences of Black diasporic populations, to the Black Pacific: an explanatory...
Junior Research Fellows, 2020-2022 " 'Who, We?' Pronominal Politics, Citizenship, and the Rights of the Other in Hashtag-Era France" ‘Who, We?’ explores the tensions between horizontal forms of political expression facilitated by social networks and vertical structures of representation in the specific French context to show how they currently challenge the...