Temporal Technologies

Cord-Heinrich (C-H) Plinke | (he/him)

Dying in a Material World: Queer Plasticity and the Poetics of Disobedience

Cord-Heinrich (C-H) Plinke is a dramaturg, social worker, and doctoral candidate in the Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture doctoral program at USC. Born and raised in Germany, he was educated at Freie Universität Berlin and the University of California, Berkeley. C-H holds a B.A. in American Studies & Political Science, and an M.A. in American Studies with a designated emphasis on sociology and culture. C-H’s dissertation project, titled “The Plastic Body: Abstraction, Alienation, and Affect in Translation,” explores writing whose abstract language does not produce a visual referent and provokes, yet precludes the attempt to visualize. The analysis culminates in a discussion of queer poetics vis-à-vis plasticity, and the proposed concept of queer plasticity. C-H has taught comparative literature, gender studies, history, sociology, and cultural studies. He is a recipient of the Hovel Endowed Fellowship and candidate for the graduate certificates in visual studies, translation studies, and gender studies at USC.

Chung Yan Chow | (she/her)

Only Temporarily a Queering Site: Resistant Strategies of and Symbolic Traffic in Women in Nisu Bots

Chung Yan (Norah) Chow is an MPhil student at the University of Hong Kong. She has participated in several research projects on the constructs of contemporary Chinese masculinity, which nurtured her interest in bridging contemporary gendered conceptions with more traditional ones. Her current research interests center around fan cultures in postsocialist China, queer theories, historical trajectories of concepts related to gender and sexuality, and Chinese literature since the seventeenth century. She is now working on the topic of nisu culture, a Chinese-specific and women-dominated fan subculture, and its embeddedness in Chinese and global society, culture, and history.

 

Christina Grübler and Z Brimacombe | (they/them), (they/them)

Video Game Glitching as Method and Metaphor: Queer Spacetime, Alternative Geographies, and Playing With the Matrix

Christina Grübler and Z. Brimacombe are recently-connected research co-conspirators. Z. Brimacombe is an undisciplined trans scholar and white settler on unceded Coast Salish land (Vancouver, BC) where they are a current graduate student in Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia’s Social Justice Institute. Their work explores the possibilities of queer play, storytelling, and spiritual knowledge and practice. Christina Grübler is a graduate student in Gender & Queer Studies from the University of Cologne, Germany. They are a fierce educator, freelance speaker, writer and early career scholar. Their research and publication interests include Queer Media Studies, Videogame Studies, Critical Heterosexuality Studies and Queer Pedagogy. As a white, German settler, Christina is currently an exchange and visiting research student at UBC’s Social Justice Institute. This is where our paths crossed and we connected through our shared experiences with and love for glitching gender.

Tengchao Zhou | (he/him)

Queer Leap Performed

Tengchao Zhou is a graduate student in Design Media Arts at UCLA. He’s a media artist who makes Gay Genetic Games: queer-themed games with virtual creatures populated with programming-language-based artificial life systems. He draws inspiration from contemporary queer studies, which he has been investigating independently since 2014. Prior, he delivered an artist talk at Art Machine 2: International Symposium on Machine Learning and Art (City University of Hong Kong) and he was an artist in resident in Rotterdam’s V2_ Lab for Unstable Media in 2019. In 2013, he received a bachelor of science from New York University, where his studies include Computer Science. Tengchao is interested in creating innovative artworks informed by interdisciplinary research, and he sees the process of creating art as the process of research.

 

Time, Touch, and Togetherness

Eliza Franklin-Edmonson | (she/her)

Let Me Tell You Something Sister: Mapping the Color Purple

Eliza Franklin-Edmondson (she/her) is a UCLA African American Studies undergraduate alumnus. She is a double Bruin as of Fall 2020 after joining UCLA’s Urban Planning graduate program. She created her own independent area of concentration, Critical Race Studies, Digital Mapping, and Heritage Conservation, to strengthen knowledge in the areas she is most passionate about. As a McNair Scholar and mentee of Dr. Tyrone Howard, she is a congressional award-winning social justice researcher. Eliza remains engaged in the fight against mass incarceration and racialized gender violence through multiple mapping projects, such as the Mujer Memorial and other biographical digital storytelling conceptions. She promotes liberation for marginalized communities worldwide who occupy rural and urban spaces. In her quest for equity, her driving force is to merge activism through the arts with her passion for urban planning to cultivate reimagined real and digital spatial imaginaries.

Sonya Merutka | (she/they)

Circling Back: Queer and Crip Weighted Time in Mel Baggs’ Kitchen Choreography

Sonya Merutka is a queer scholar and community organizer researching choreographies of weighted movement, friction, and pleasure in contemporary feminist and queer performance art and practice. They recently completed their master’s degree in Performance Studies at New York University and received their bachelor’s degree in Feminist Philosophy and Visual Culture from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the co-founder and organizer of Queer Theory Reading Group, an interdisciplinary, community-based, weekly education forum with an emphasis on critical queer studies, which was founded in Berlin in 2015. She has presented work at New York University, The Graduate Center at CUNY, York University, UCLA, and The Association of Theater in Higher Education.

 

Vanessa Barcelos da Silva | (she/her)

Reading women’s demonic grounds through a black queer touch in Naudline Pierre’s Closed Quarters

Vanessa Rodrigues Barcelos da Silva is a first-year Ph.D. student in the English Department of the University of Miami. She has worked for more than 10 years as a teacher in diverse settings. Her research concentrates on Early Modern and Medieval literary approaches to witchcraft.

 

 

 

 

Spectral Encounters

Fatemeh Gharibi | (they/them)

Killing Mahtab: Haunting Memory of an Iranian Transgender Refugee in Canada

Fati Gharibi (they/them) is a Ph.D. student in Gender, Feminist, and Women’s Studies at York University, Canada. They identify as a queer feminist of the Global Majority. Currently, they work as artist-scholar. Their research interests include queer theory, transnational sexualities, nationalism and necropolitics, settler colonialism, migration and diaspora, critical race studies and queer theatre and performance studies. 

For their master’s in the same program, Fati focused on queer spectatorship and surviving/resisting heteropatriarchal censorship in theatre in Iran. For their Ph.D., they are looking at how newcomers of the Global Majority negotiate their transitioning identities, especially gender and sexuality, with their new locations in ongoing Canadian projects of racialization and settler colonialism. Fati uses theatre and performance, among other methods, to address these issues.

Jersey Cosantino | (they/them)

The Becoming: A Mad Trans Oral History Poetic Performance

Jersey Cosantino (they/them), a former K-12 educator, is a doctoral student in Cultural Foundations of Education at Syracuse University, pursuing certificates of advanced study in women’s and gender studies and disability studies. Jersey’s scholarship resides at the intersections of Mad studies and trans studies. Utilizing disability and transformative justice frameworks, their research centers the experiences and subjectivities of Mad, neurodivergent, trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming individuals. Jersey identifies as Mad, neurodivergent, trans, and non-binary and is white with class, education, and citizenship privilege. A co-facilitator for SU’s Intergroup Dialogue Program, Jersey holds a master’s in education and graduate certificate in mindfulness studies. Additionally, for the past three years, Jersey has engaged in peer support work via an abolitionist framework as a volunteer call operator with the Trans Lifeline.

Preston Taylor Stone | (he/him)

Ghosting the Spectral State: Deviance and Spectrality in American Protest Cultures

Preston Taylor Stone (M.A.) is an Indigiqueer ᏣᎳᎩᏱ ᏕᏣᏓᏂᎸᎩ writer-performer from South Carolina. He is of mixed-blood Cherokee descent (Eastern Band), and he is currently an English PhD candidate at the University of Miami, where his research project is preliminarily titled Ghosts Coalition: Deviance & Spectrality in American Protest Cultures. He has presented at such conferences as SAMLA, MELUS, and the Marxist Literary Group’s Institute on Culture and Society. Two of his essays are in the revise/resubmit stage for Journal of Modern Literature (JML) and Studies in American Fiction (SAF). He Chairs the English Graduate Organization, serves as Parliamentarian to the Graduate Student Association (GSA), and is the recipient of two consecutive GSA Awards for Academic Excellence, Leadership, and Service. His fiction and poetry have appeared in New Reader Magazine, The Moth, and Flash Fiction Magazine. He is chief editor of KAIROS Literary Magazine (kairoslit.com). Website: prestontaylorstone.com.

Wesley Cornwell | (he/him)

On shadows and other queer becomings

Wesley Cornwell is a writer, theater designer, and MDes student at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. His theoretical, critical, and design work explores new phenomenologies of time, focusing on our experience of time as rendered sensible through architecture, art, and performance. He studies queer temporality and the unstable, impermanent, and contested edges of memory as mediated by materiality. His related interests include Marxist and feminist literary theory, the biopolitics of queerness, and the ordinary.

He a contributor to the futureStage project at metaLAB, and prior to the GSD, he worked in New York City as a scenic and lighting designer. He graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University with a concentration in Anthropology and a certificate in Theater. His undergraduate research explored the literary and cultural history of American nostalgia with particular attention towards material objects, and he was awarded the Louis Sudler Prize in the Arts.

 

Queer Family

Bryce Jeter | (he/him)

Othermother Realness: Marlon Riggs, Ballroom House Mothers, and Embodiments of Queer and Black Alternative Motherhood in the AIDS Epidemic

Bryce M. Jeter is a second-year graduate student and teacher of record at Texas State University in San Marcos, TX, where he is currently pursuing a degree in Literature with a minor in Diversity Studies. As a scholar, Bryce has an avid interest in queer studies, predominantly in literature and media, and is currently in the process of applying for Ph.D. programs to pursue his doctorate in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.  

 

 

Olumayowa Willoughby | (they/them/he/him/she/hers)

The Future is Black Stuff

Olumayowa BAM Willoughby is a PhD Candidatein in the field of Africana Studies at Cornell University. They received their B.A in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth College in 2014. Bam is interested in black historiographies of Ottoman and post-Ottoman worlds, proletarianization of Africans in the Ottoman Empire, geographies of African-descended populations in contemporary Turkey, slavery, and how approaching historiography in new ways can challenge prevailing notions about the emergence of race, sex, and gender within a nation-state context. Their current research project analyzes Turkish historiography through the 1892 manumission of enslaved Africans in Northern Africa and their subsequent relocation into Southwestern Anatolia for the express purpose of land cultivation—all within the context of their “freedom”. This research project seeks to understand this historiographic moment as a driver for “black” identity formation in contemporary Turkey, and to provide a scaffolding for contextualizing the kinds of conditions that have made “black” Aegean, rural living, livelihood, and survival possible in contemporary Turkey.

Tegan Flowers | (she/they)

Queer Fertility: Resistance Through the Folding of Time

Tegan Flowers is a PhD student at the University of Virginia in the School of Nursing and also simultaneously completing a Graduate Certificate in UVA’s Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality department.  After several years of clinical practice in reproductive care, she returned to school to pursue research in reproductive justice within the context of queer advocacy.  Tegan’s research currently focuses on the (re)shaping of subjectivity through queer family formation and reproduction as well as the (re)forming of kinship structures through queer family.  

 

A Sacred Time and Place

Mel Livermore | (they/them)

i burn the past in the present, to the future as the past through the present: an exploration of queer and christian temporalities

Mel Joy Livermore is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher. Their research explores ideological construction and deconstruction through a performative and autoethnographic lens.
They will earn a Master of Arts in Communication Studies in May of 2022 from Ball State
University and earned a Bachelors of Fine Arts with a concentration in Fine Art Photography
from Ball State University in 2015. Livermore’s primary body of work is a participatory practice of unraveling fabric thread by thread called Deconstruction. They have facilitated this practice both nationally and internationally as a visiting artist.

Rachel Morrison | (she/her)

“Everywhere Present to Me: Time, Space, and Queer Belonging in the Letters of Ausonius of Bordeaux and Paulinus of Nola”

Rachel C. Morrison is a Classics PhD student at UCLA. She earned her B.A. in Classics (summa
cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) from Denison University in 2016 and her M.A. in Classical
Languages from the University of Kansas in 2018. Her interests include Augustan poetry, ancient
drama, Flavian literature, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century abolitionist reception of the
classics, late antique epistolography, and ancient theorizations of friendship and the erotic.

Upasana Banerjee | (she/her)

The Postcolonial Turn : Marginality And Mobilisation Of Manipuri Queer Advocacy

Upasana Banerjee is an independent research scholar with a postgraduate degree in Comparative Literature from Jadavpur University. She advocates for Indigenous Queer Rights and Body Positivity Movement. Her research interests include Indiqueer activism, Black feminist movement, South-asian culture, Transnational studies and Contemporary marxist feminist literature. 

 

Queer Time in the City

Dennis Ohm | (he/him)

(Un)building Queer Temporalities. Architectures, Affect, and the Memorialization of New York’s Waterfront

Dennis Ohm holds an M.A. in Social Sciences from Humboldt University of Berlin. In his Master’s thesis Queer Intimacies and Temporalities of AIDS. An Archive of New York City’s Waterfront, he investigated the ways in which queer memories and affects of nostalgia, longing, and melancholia shape contemporary intimacies and relational possibilities. Currently, he is a PhD student in Anthropology at McGill University in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal and works on the politics of intimacy, love, and relationality through the lens of architecture, embodiment, social movements, and temporality. His research interests include queer theory and archives, affect theory, anarchism, critical theory, and experimental writing.

Jamie Ross | (he/they)

A Conspiracy of Drinkers: Spit, Cider, Syphilis Cures and the Raid of the 606 Club of LA, 1914

Jamie Ross (1987, Canada) is a visual artist, a city gardener, and queer history researcher.
Recent projects include curating a major archival and contemporary art exhibition on the
occasion of the 50th anniversary of the partial decriminalization of sodomy in Canada (Montréal, arts interculturels) and a presentation of their research on the underground Quebecois psychedelic gay liberation publication Mainmise for 2019 Carleton University’s Queer Studies conference.

Jamie’s video works have been screened and installed in exhibitions in Argentina, Chile,
Colombia, England, France, Haiti, Hong Kong, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, Sweden, the
United States, and throughout Canada. Recent work was presented at the Plug In ICA
(Winnipeg, Canada), Lugar a Dudas (Cali, Colombia), and the Momenta Biennale (Montréal, Québec). Jamie lives in Los Angeles, where they are an MFA candidate in Interdisciplinary Studio Art on a Fulbright Scholarship.

Tuna Öğüt | (he/they)

Placing trans-becoming: Understanding transition through geographies

Tuna Öğüt is a student of M.Sc. in Istanbul Technical University Architectural Design Program, currently doing an ethnographic fieldwork on gender and space. He is also a Research Assistant in Istanbul Bilgi University Faculty of Architecture, teaching third year architectural design and urban studies studios. Tuna also does photography with a focus on performance arts. He is board member at Poedat, an interdisciplinary social sciences initiative that organizes academic events and brings together researchers and other specialists from various fields.