Event

Featured Speaker

Cole Rizki, Ph.D. is assistant professor of Latin American Studies in the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese and affiliate faculty with the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and the Department of American Studies at the University of Virginia. In 2024-2025, Rizki will be on leave with the support of an ACLS Fellowship. Rizki is a Latin Americanist and transgender studies scholar whose research examines the entanglements of transgender cultural production and activisms with histories of state violence and terror throughout the Américas. As a scholar of contemporary Latin American gender and sexuality studies, visual culture, memory studies, history, and performance studies, his work makes central interventions across these disciplines. Primarily, he analyzes the work of contemporary politics and aesthetics by examining how political demands take shape and become legible through visual, embodied, and archival representations and practices. Rizki’s monograph in process tentatively titled Travesti Tide: Trans Politics Beyond Liberalism offers a new historical and cultural interpretation of trans politics as a response to illiberal state violence and its forms. In doing so, the monograph provincializes US-centric histories of state violence, the liberal democratic state form, and identity politics that continue to underwrite the field of transgender studies. At the same time, Travesti Tide revises the study of fascism, authoritarianism, and populism by highlighting how sex and gender are central to these forms of governance and power.

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the CLALS Graduate Advisory Board, and GSWS/FQT.