Kalin Smith is a doctoral researcher in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature and drama whose work examines intersections of theatre, politics, and celebrity.

My current research project looks at racial passing in African American literature, film, and memoir from the 19th to 21st centuries. Unlike most scholarship on racial passing that centers light-skinned black or mixed-raced figures passing as white, my approach insists that we explicitly decenter whiteness in our engagement with passing in order to more fully explore what passing might do for black people. I read passing as a form of black performance that challenges the supposed stability of what it means to be human.

My dissertation explores British speculative fiction writers who attempt to imagine new collective political possibilities and more equitable futures, but whose visions are weakened by a latent nostalgia for the British Empire that permeates their work.

Linzey’s interdisciplinary research focuses on the experiences of queer Caribbean and diaspora peoples. Working across Gender and Sexuality Studies, Queer Theory, Literary Criticism, Caribbean Studies, Policy Studies, and Digital Humanities, his doctoral research interrogates failing discourses on the nature of West Indian queerness. His body of scholarship is preoccupied with asking readers to rethink how we come to understand the quotidian as it relates to Queeribbean/diaspora places and peoples. He is currently building a near comprehensive database of queer West Indian writings from 1900 to present day entitled Juks.

My research is located across the field of nineteenth-century transatlantic studies where I explore women’s embodied self-knowledge as a site of disruption to the masculinization and institutionalization of medicine and medical discourse. The internationalization of medical knowledge and the institutionalization of medicine granted the nineteenth-century physician extraordinary power to access and diagnose individual, social, and national bodies. In literary and medical discourse, the masculinized authority of the medical institution is reaffirmed through the archetypal scene of the intervening male physician and dependent woman patient. My dissertation interrogates the dichotomous relationship between the nineteenth-century male physician and the woman patient by turning to non-medical texts written or dictated by women that subvert medical knowledge production by refiguring woman’s self-embodied knowledge knowledge as the essential point of reference. Attending to the manifold ways in which women understood and articulated their embodied knowledges, experiences, and affect in novels, short stories, slave narratives, and autobiographical accounts, my project challenges institutional and pedagogical models of health, illness, and care that fragment women’s bodies. Attending to the works of women such as Mary Prince, Harriet Jacobs, Mary Seacole, Charlotte Brontë, Louisa May Alcott, and Florence Marryat, I consider how women occupying various positionalities and geographies take up their bodies in multiform and often contradictory ways that destabilize the hierarchization of medical subjects, articulate the layered complexities of providing and receiving care, and account for the unresolved conflict between women’s embodied self-knowledge and the permanency of colonial, imperial, and patriarchal efforts that materialize within Western institutions and practices.

My research focuses on literary explorations of ecologically-grounded relationships between settlers and Indigenous peoples. I investigate how settlers can begin living in reciprocal responsibility to our ecorelations on Indigenous land.

Marika’s research looks to speculative texts (fictional or not) to question the ideological function of the category broadly called “nature” and, ultimately, to help point to better possible futures for human and more- than-human lives.