ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½

I research the racialization of body weight in contemporary multi-ethnic American literature and film, with an emphasis on Latinx and African American cultural production. My dissertation argues that dominant narratives of fat people as sick, ugly, alien, and prematurely dead work to racialize fatness, and I show how American artists confront and subvert this reality in service of both fat and racial liberation.

Selected Publications

“’A Sensual People, and Doomed’: Anti-Fatness and/as Anti-Mexican Racism in America’s First Mass Medium,” Ethnic Studies Review, vol. 47, no. 2-3, 2024, pp. 3–20.

“’My Heart’s Fine as Long as My Stomach’s Not Empty’: Patriarchal Violence, Women’s Excess, and Fat Liberation in Criminally Insane,” Fat Studies, vol. 13, no. 1, 2024, pp. 22-35.

“Wounding the Heteropatriarchy: Queered and Disabled Histories in Caballero and Forgetting the Alamo,” Studies in American Fiction, forthcoming.

“’On Being Fat’: Sharon Page Ritchie and Contemporary Fat Black Feminist Politics,” accepted for inclusion in a volume edited by Jennifer C. Nash and Mishana Garschi.

Selected Honors, Awards, and Fellowships

2024 Black Feminist Theory Summer Institute, Duke University

2024 Los Angeles Review of Books Summer Publishing Workshop Fellow

2024 Summer Research and Writing Fellowship, Dedman College Interdisciplinary Institute, ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½

2024 Outstanding Graduate Student Instruction Award, Moody Graduate School, ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½

2023 Nina Schwartz Graduate Student Teaching Award, English Department, ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½