Jamie Lee

Jamie Lee
Cohort Year: 2021
Research Interests: African American Literature | Black Feminist Thought | Performance Studies | 20th/21st Visual Cultures | Trans* Studies | Ecocriticism/Environment Humanities | Affect Studies
Education: University of California, San Diego - (B.A) Ethnic Studies (honors), 2015; New York University - (M.A) Performance Studies, 2017

Biography

I am a joint PhD student here at The University of Chicago in the departments of English Language and Literature and Theater and Performance Studies.

The impetus of my work finds itself caught up in the thinking/doing/feeling of 20th and 21st century eco-literary and eco-artistic works written and created by Black women and Femmes. I am interested in engaging what it might mean to negotiate the category of human/non-human, as well the ways this finds itself positioned within moments and scenes of doom, devastation, and catastrophe within the current geological era, otherwise known as the "Anthropoecene". I am deeply intrigued by the ways Black Women and Femmes 'earth" in their writing and art practice. Moreover, I also am curious in thinking about the ways we can mobilize trans* as an emergent analytic, guiding principle, and commonplace for meditating on the entwined relation of race, gender, and ecology. By discussing new theories of relationality and embodiment in Black Feminist ecocriticism and its praxis, my research seeks to illuminate modes of gathering , assembly, and congregating in the lives of Black women and Femmes, and how these strategies in Black Feminist literature and art move us towards an insistence on Black livability that gesture towards new transcoporealities at the end of the world.