Ronak K Kapadia | University of Illinois at Chicago (original) (raw)

I am an interdisciplinary scholar of race, culture, war, and empire in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century United States. Currently, I am an associate professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and affiliated faculty in Art History, Global Asian Studies, and Museum & Exhibition Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. Previously, I was a 2019-2020 Visiting Scholar at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute of NYU, and I held a 2012-2013 University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside. I received my BA with honors and distinction in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity from Stanford University, where I was awarded the Robert M. Golden Medal for Excellence in the Humanities, and I received my PhD in American Studies from the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU, where I was awarded the College of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Teaching Award.

My research interests include critical studies of US empire, national security, and state surveillance; counterinsurgency policing and militarized warfare; visual culture and aesthetics; South Asian and Middle Eastern diasporas; queer and feminist criticism; radical social movements; and theories of affect, embodiment, and sensation. My first book, 'Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War’ (Duke University Press, 2019) was awarded the 2020 Surveillance Studies Network (SSN) Book Award. The book examines the race-radical queer feminist visions, sensations, and freedom dreams of the Muslim International, a constellation of transnational South Asian and Arab visual art and aesthetics that together comprise a rebuttal to the dominant ways we have come to think, feel, sense, and map the world amidst contemporary US global state violence and its forever wars of security and terror in the Greater Middle East. My writing has been published in Asian American Literary Review, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Feminist Formations, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Post45, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, Surveillance & Society, and numerous edited volumes including: Shifting Borders: America and the Middle East/North Africa (AUB Press, 2014), Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader (Duke UP, 2016), and With Stones in Our Hands: Racism, Muslims and US Empire (U Minnesota Press, 2018). With Simone Browne and Katherine McKittrick, I co-edited the special issue on "race, communities, and informants" for Surveillance & Society (2017). I am researching my next book, "Breathing in the Brown Queer Commons: Migrant Futurisms of Survival/Healing/Justice," which advances a critical theory of healing justice across multiple transnational sites of security, terror, and war and amidst the wilds of US imperial decline. Finally, I am a lead project director and co-curator of "Surviving the Long Wars"--a major NEH-funded public humanities exhibition series that culminated in the 2023 Veteran Art Triennial and Summit at Chicago Cultural Center, Hyde Park Art Center, and Newberry Library.

My broader research and teaching fields include critical ethnic studies, queer studies, transnational and women of color feminisms, visual and performance studies, contemporary art and aesthetics, affect and sensory studies, critical prison and security studies, theories of abolition and decolonization, critical disability studies and environmental humanities, and interdisciplinary approaches to US foreign policy and US Empire, the contemporary Middle East and South Asia, South Asian and Arab diasporas, and the Muslim International. My work has been supported by the NYU Henry MacCracken Fellowship, the Mellon/ACLS Fellowship, the Consortium for Faculty Diversity in the Liberal Arts Colleges Dissertation Fellowship, the NYU Dean's Dissertation Award, the University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship, the UIC Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy Faculty Fellowship, the UIC Great Cities Institute Faculty Scholarship, the UIC LAS Dean’s Award for Faculty Research in the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. I am currently on the Advisory Boards of the journals Verge: Studies in Global Asias and Surveillance & Society. I have held elected leadership positions with the American Studies Association (2020-2023), the Association for Asian American Studies (2010-2012), and I was the co-convener of the Newberry Library's Scholarly Seminar on Gender and Sexuality (2018-2020). Outside of academia, I have served on the board of directors of FIERCE, working to build the leadership and power of queer and trans youth of color in NYC.

I welcome correspondence from anyone with broadly overlapping intellectual and political affiliations (ronak@uic.edu). My twitter handle is @profkapadia.

To order my book for 30% off the cover price, enter code "E19KAPAD" at checkout here: https://www.dukeupress.edu/insurgent-aesthetics
Supervisors: Gayatri Gopinath, José Esteban Muñoz, Lisa Duggan, Nikhil Pal Singh, Crystal Parikh, and Jodi Kim
Address: Gender & Women's Studies Program (MC 360)
University of Illinois at Chicago
601 S. Morgan Street, Chicago, IL 60607

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