Aren Aizura is Associate Professor in Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota. His first book, Mobile Subjects: Transnational Imaginaries of Gender Reassignment (2018), won the Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies in 2019. He coedited the Transgender Studies Reader 2 (2013) and Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies (2021), as well as a special issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly on Decolonizing the Transgender Imaginary (2013). His most recent work appeared in TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly.
Leticia Alvarado is Associate Professor of American Studies at Brown University. She is the author of Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Production (2018). Her current book project, Cut/Hoard/Suture: Aesthetics in Relation, has been supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and the American Association of University Women.
Heather Berg writes about sex, work, and social struggle. Her first book, Porn Work (2021), explores workers’ strategies for navigating—and subverting—precarity. Her writing also appears in the journals Feminist Studies, Signs, and others. She is Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.
Marquis Bey is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English, and Gender & Sexuality Studies and Critical Theory, at Northwestern University. They are the author, most recently, of the books Black Trans Feminism and Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender, both published with Duke University Press in 2022.
Andrew Cutrone is a PhD Candidate in Sociology and a Graduate Affiliate of the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at the University of Texas, Austin. He writes about and studies Black social theory and abolition politics. His research examines, but ultimately seeks to dispense with, the regime of the normative subject, preferring, instead, to induce and honor instances of fugitive coalition. Specifically, Andrew reads a range of archival materials to theorize the radicality underpinning the relationship between fugitive enslaved people and those who aided in their escape.
Ramzi Fawaz is a Romnes Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the author of The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (2016) and Queer Forms (2022). With Darieck Scott he coedited a special issue of American Literature titled “Queer About Comics,” which won the 2019 best special issue of the year award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. Alongside Deborah E. Whaley and Shelley Streeby, he coedited Keywords for Comics Studies, which was selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2022. Fawaz is currently at work on a new book project titled “Literary Theory on Acid,” in which he argues for the necessity of literary and cultural studies approaches to the contemporary psychedelic renaissance.
Lisa Guenther is Queen's National Scholar in Political Philosophy and Critical Prison Studies at Queen's University in Canada. She is the author of Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives (2013) and co-editor of Death and Other Penalties: Philosophy in a Time of Mass Incarceration (2015).
Huey Hewitt is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, where he is also a Harvard Presidential Scholar and Prize Fellow. He holds an MA in history from Harvard and a BA in black studies and history from Amherst College. His dissertation is an intellectual history of black anarchism in the United States in the twentieth-century.
Candice J. Merritt is a PhD Candidate in the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University. She holds an MA in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Georgia State University and a BA in Women's Studies from Emory University. Her dissertation project, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Freedom: Examining the Felt Life of Black Motherhood,” centers Black women's disavowals of motherhood in the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries and theorizes its implications for Black feminist theories of mothering and reproductive freedom. Her essay “Trapped in the Political Real: Imagining Black Motherhood Beyond Pathology and Protest” is included in The New Feminist Literary Studies, edited by Jennifer Cooke (2020).
Durba Mitra is the Richard B. Wolf Associate Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. She is the author of Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought (2020). Her current project explores the history of Third World feminist thought.
Jennifer C. Nash is the Jean Fox O'Barr Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. She is the author of The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography (2014); Black Feminism Reimagined (2019); Birthing Black Mothers (2021); and the forthcoming How We Write Now: Living with Black Feminist Theory. She is the editor of Gender: Love (2016) and a coeditor (along with Samantha Pinto) of The Routledge Companion to Intersectionalities (2022).
Emily Owens is the David and Michelle Ebersman Assistant Professor of History at Brown University, where she does research on and teaches about US slavery, the legal history of race and sexual violence, and the intellectual history of American feminisms. Her work broadly considers the ways that racism and misogyny get expressed in ordinary—and intimate—life. She is the author of Consent in the Presence of Force: Sexual Violence and Black Women's Survival in Antebellum New Orleans (2023), and her writing can also be found in Signs: Journal of Women, Culture and Society, The Black Scholar, Literary Hub, and Louisiana History.
Samantha Pinto is Professor of English, director of the Humanities Institute, core faculty of Women's and Gender Studies and affiliated faculty of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Difficult Diasporas: The Transnational Feminist Aesthetic of the Black Atlantic (2013) and Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women's Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights (2020).
S. B. West is Assistant Professor in Gender, Women's and Sexuality Studies and is affiliated faculty in Latinx and Latin American Studies at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. Their research and intellectual production is focused on breaking away from traditional approaches to the study and engagement of the “Latin American” literary and cultural canon. West's work is organized around theoretical frameworks—specifically, those with roots in abolitionist, decolonial and trans feminisms—that question and challenge the always already colonial, cisheteronormative underpinnings of gender, class and race relations. While “Caste War Textualities,” their current project, is a rereading of Yucatán's nineteenth-century textual register that emphasizes how the concept of race war mobilized the transference of colonial oppression into liberal state-building, they also have active projects on contemporary Yucatec Maya “literature”, US Spanish-language “im/migration” literature, and feminist theory.
Robyn Wiegman is a professor in the Program in Literature and Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University and the author and editor of numerous projects on racial formation, feminist and queer theory, US studies, and cultural studies.
