Xine Yao, Lecturer in American Literature to 1900 and co-director of the queer studies network at University College London, will deliver the Jackson and Nichols Distinguished Lecture Thursday (April 14) at 7 p.m. in 130 Colson Hall and via Zoom.
Yao’s talk, “On Unfeeling: The Racial and Sexual Politics of Disaffection,” will address her innovative theorizing of the concept of "unfeeling," which she develops in her book “Disaffection: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America.”
This event is free and open to the public. Register to attend either in-person or virtually.
She will discuss what she terms "unfeeling" as a tactic of refusing oppressive systems. Her presentation asks: What does racial justice look like? Why have racially minoritized people in the United States been required to reveal their humanity in order to be treated equally? And can empathy actually impede racial justice?
Yao’s book won the Scholars of Color First Book Award from Duke University Press in 2021. Her honors include the American Studies Association’s Yasuo Sakakibara Essay Prize and her research has been supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She also co-hosts a podcast called PhDivas, which interviews women from STEM and Humanities arenas about their research and experiences of working in academia. She was named a 2020 New Generation Thinker by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
The Jackson and Nichols Distinguished Lecture is sponsored by the West Virginia University Department of English, Humanities Center and Department of Women’s and Gender Studies.