About
Aaron J. Stone is a PhD candidate in English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan and the James A. Winn Graduate Student Fellow at the U-M Institute for the Humanities for 2020-21. Their primary research interests span queer and trans studies, modernist studies, and narrative theory. Stone’s dissertation project, Desires for Form, explores the social crisis of form that nascent queer communities faced in early twentieth-century America as queer people tried to imagine what shapes their lives might take. The project investigates how these subjects turned to narrative to work out their desires for form, focusing especially on how queer yearnings for structure and stability conflicted with the modernist eschewal of “conventional” forms. They have also written a chapter for the edited collection The Cultural Impact of RuPaul’s Drag Race: Why Are We All Gagging?, forthcoming from Intellect Books in 2021.
Stone is also the current nonfiction editor for the Michigan Quarterly Review (MQR), the cofounder and co-coordinator of the U-M Modernist Studies Workshop, and a member of the Lesbian-Gay-Queer Research Initiative (LGQRI) steering committee.
