Overview
Liz received their dual-title Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies with a minor in German from Pennsylvania State University, where they was most recently employed as a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow. Fluent in German, Liz has conducted extensive research, supported by Fulbright Germany and the Max Kade Institute, in German archives as well as at poetry slam events in Berlin and München. Grounded in trans and queer literatures of the Weimar era, their research examines how literary and historical texts take up and contribute to taxonomies, labels, and non-normative embodiments, and how these texts imagine queer kinship, community-building, and solidarity. In both in their research and teaching, Liz deploys comparative, transdisciplinary, and feminist frameworks to engage critically with gender, sexuality, race, and the environment globally and in Germanophone locales.
Office Hours
Mondays 12:00PM-1:00PM (email in advance at ems498@cornell.edu)
Research Focus
My recent scholarship explores Germanophone and Anglophone creative production through the lens of race, gender, sexuality, and affinities across species. More specifically, I address disciplinary intersections between trans studies, queer theory, Black feminist thought, Anthropocene studies, and queer ecologies.
My current book project, “Speculative Formations: Queer and Trans Communities in the Long Twentieth Century,” traces the literary impulse of reaching out to other non-normative persons within poetry, science and speculative fiction, novels, and graphic narratives. I consider the following questions: how do non-normative communities span time through textual means? How do we recognize and enter into conversation with queer and trans communities of the past? What new or speculative ways of caring for and establishing solidarities among persons/species with shared marginalities might we imagine? The literary work of caring for, advocating for, or reaching out to those who fall outside of normative power rests upon naming, creating labels, and offering a level of legibility. In this way, locating queer and trans folks of the past or imagining a future where non-normative bodies and species can thrive is speculative. With attention to traditions in Germany, Western Europe, and the U.S., I argue that the literary use of taxonomies fundamentally renders them more capacious and, thus, expands the possibilities of community, kinship, and solidarity. Authors considered include anonymous and named poets in Die Freundin, Aimée Duc, Anna Elisabeth Weirauch, Radclyffe Hall, Lili Elbe, and Jeanette Winterson; and the graphic novelists Fiona Staples, Brian K. Vaughan, Kelly Sue DeConnick, and Valentine De Landro.