About

My scholarly work variously investigates aesthetic production, biopolitics and the history of ideas via an interdisciplinary methodology grounded in close reading practices. In all of my writing and teaching on cultural form I seek to put multiple theories of the political, including queer, feminist, Marxist, Black diasporic, and postcolonial thought, into conversation with each other, while grounding all of my projects in a thorough archival and historical practice.

With a background as a journalist I have also produced a fair amount of public-facing writing, for instance with the Los Angeles Review of Books. My article about teaching feminist theory went viral and has had over 70,000 individual downloads. In the past I published reviews and food writing with The Toronto Star (online), The Globe and Mail, Xtra Magazine and 7x7 magazine. I am often asked to comment on food, race and art for the New York Times (pandemic cakes, healthy food, and lattes), NPR (beans, macho veganism) for various food and history podcasts (The History Guys, Critical Consumption), as well as the BBC (lattes again)and CBC (chaos cakes). I currently have a book contract to write about the seventies and learning to write from William Goldman’s novel The Princess Bride. I also periodically write a free substack newsletter about race and academia.

I completed the bulk of my academic training in literature departments with sub-fields in cultural and feminist theory, film studies and U.S. history. Across my first two book projects I have largely focused on: comparative histories of racialization in the United States; the history of sexuality with a focus on biopolitics and queer (in particular queer of color) theory; nineteenth-century prose literature with an emphasis on the comparative and connected relations between white and African-American writers; science studies; performance studies; and early film and visual media including gag reels, silent film and comics. I am particularly interested in the production of aesthetic form and sensory effect within and across various cultural media. Most recently my work has investigated the limits and uses of new materialist philosophy. Last but not least I have consistently returned to the study of the matter we often call "food" to understand all of the above.

My first book won the Lora Romero prize for Best First Book in American Studies and Best Book from the Association for the Study of Food and Society. My second monograph Deviant Matter will be released with New York University Press in 2024.

In 2021 with my colleagues and fellow collective members Aimee Bahng, Karma Chavez, Mishuana Goeman, Amber Musser, and Aren Aizura I published Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies with NYU Press. Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies was named as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2021. Together we edited the volume as the Keywords Feminist Editorial Collective, and I served as the managing editor. A podcast series attached to the book, supported by a grant from the Mellon Initiative in Intersectional Studies and the USC consortium for Gender Studies, is forthcoming in 2023. You can read the collective’s co-written introduction and some sample essays at the Keywords website.

I am currently on leave from my position as Professor at Pomona College, and I am Chair of the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Buffalo. My scholarly writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture, Women and Performance, American Quarterly, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth Century Americanists, Lateral: The Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, The Journal of Food, Culture and Society as well as Social Text, Lateral and ASAP/Journal, while my journalism has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, The Globe and Mail, Xtra Magazine, 7x7 Magazine and journals like Tikkun and Bridges. In the latter journals I have written autobiographical pieces about diasporic and indigenous North African Jewish life.

I have also contributed blog posts to the NYU Press blog From The Square (here, and here) as well as Social Text’s Periscope section, as part of a group response to Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism. I also participate in public humanities writing through Avidly, a channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books, and have written for Bully Bloggers, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Review of Books. In the spring of 2016, I was the co-editor of a special double issue of GLQ: Gay and Lesbian Quarterly entitled On The Visceral.