Monday, October 7
4:00 - 6:00 p.m., THH 420
Light refreshments will be provided.

In this event, Tompkins puts queer of color aesthetic theory into conversation with philosophical investigations into the agency of lively matter. Tompkins investigates how rot and decomposition provide a language for theorizing a queer and “de-formalist” history of race and sexuality as against the return of a purist formalism enchanted with its salvific relations to aesthetics. 

Kyla Tompkins is an associate professor of English and Gender and Women’s Studies at Pomona College and author of Radical Indigestion (2012). Her work investigates aesthetic production, biopolitics, and the history of ideas via an interdisciplinary methodology grounded in close reading practices.