Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Affiliated Faculty in Global Asian Studies and Museum & Exhibition Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago
About
Ronak K. Kapadia is an interdisciplinary scholar of race, culture, war, and empire in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century United States. He is author of Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War (Duke UP 2019). His new work, "Breathing in the Brown Queer Commons," reads the expressive cultures of queer and trans migrants of color to develop a critical theory of healing justice across transnational sites of security, terror, and war.
Current Work:
Dr. Kapadia's research focuses primarily on the aesthetics and politics of Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians in the US and globally, but he takes his cues more broadly from the survival strategies, knowledge practices, and world-making acts of resistance of queer and trans communities of color across North America. Throughout, Kapadia is inspired by how the emergent fields of critical ethnic studies, Black studies, intersectional feminisms, and queer of color critique can amplify our investigations of the major overlapping political crises of our time, including racist police violence, mass deportations, foreign and domestic wars, rampant economic inequality, resurgent nativism and fascism, and ecological catastrophe.
Research Area Keyword(s):
US empire, national security, contemporary art, queer and feminist criticism
