Lecture by Kyla Wazana Tompkins, "So Moved: Ferment, Jelly, Intoxication, Rot"

Kyla Wazana Tompkins will give a talk titled "So Moved: Ferment, Jelly, Intoxication, Rot" on Friday, April 13 at 4pm in the Fordham Law School Building (150 W. 62nd. St), Room 309. Tompkins is Associate Professor of English and Gender and Women's Studies at Pomona College and the author of Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century (NYU Press, 2012). Racial Indigestion won the 2013 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize presented by the American Studies Association and the 2013 Association for the Study of Food and Society Book Award.

This talk is drawn from research on Tompkins's current book project, So Moved: Deformalist Aesthetics, Science And Citizenship In The Long Nineteenth Century. Tompkins describes her work as "variously investigat[ing] 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." Tompkins is also the author of an online essay about teaching and reading theory that  was widely shared amongst graduate students and others, titled "We Aren't Here to Learn What We Already Know."

This talk is sponsored by: the English Department; the programs in American Studies, Comparative Literature, and Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies; and the Dean of Fordham College at Lincoln Center.