The Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies
GSWS Graduate Associate
I am a PhD candidate in the department of English at Penn. My dissertation considers how the authors Nella Larsen, Jean Rhys, Adrienne Rich, and Toni Morrison intervene in debates about about birth control, abortion, midwifery, obstetrics, and motherhood circulating during their moment of writing. By asserting the centrality of reproductive practices and politics to twentieth-century projects of racial, gender and sexual regulation and liberation, these authors, I suggest, demand from their critical (and especially queer theoretical) readers a renewed questioning of what we think of when we read the phrase “the history of sexuality.”
My writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the James Baldwin Review, QED: A Journal of Queer Worldmaking, Criticism, and the Routledge Companion to Queer Literary Studies. I hold graduate certificates from the Program in Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies and Penn's Center for Teaching and Learning, and I have taught in both the English department and the program in Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at Penn. I was a coordinator for the Gender and Sexuality Studies reading group (2020-2021) as well as President of the Graduate English Association (2020-2021). I am a Graduate Associate for the Program in Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies (2022-23). I’m looking forward to working as part of the GSWS community this year!