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Dr. Julietta  Singh
Dr. Julietta Singh
Professor of English and Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies
Stephanie Bennett-Smith Chair of Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies
Interdisciplinary Program Coordinator, Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies
Profile

Julietta Singh is a decolonial scholar and nonfiction writer whose work engages the enduring global effects of colonization through attention to ecology, inheritance, race, gender and sexuality. She works and teaches across the fields of postcolonial and decolonial studies, queer studies, the ecological humanities, experimental feminisms, and creative nonfictions. Her academic work has been published in South Atlantic QuarterlyWomen & PerformanceSocial Text, Cultural Critique, and Studies in Gender and Sexuality, among others. She is the recent recipient of the American Council for Learned Societies Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship (held at Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender), and delivers keynotes, lectures, and creative workshops internationally.

Her first academic book, Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements (Duke UP, 2018), has emerged as a vital theoretical touchstone for global scholars and artists grappling with the politics of mastery that drive our professional, political, and personal pursuits. Her second book, No Archive Will Restore You (Punctum Books, 2018), turns theory into creative praxis through an experimental meditation on the body as a plural and porous archive. In her newest work, The Breaks, Singh pens a long letter to her young daughter about race, inheritance, and queer mothering at the end of the world. It has recently been hailed as a best nonfiction book of the year by entities such as the New York Public Library, Book Riot, and the Seminary Co-op Bookstore.

Singh is currently at work on The Nest, a feature-length documentary collaboration with Chase Joynt about radical maternities, interracial alliances, and anticolonial histories across 140 years of Canadian history told through the story of a single house. Taking a majestic home located in the center of Canada as its focus, the documentary looks to architecture as a portal through which to tell unexpected histories of Westward expansion, Indigenous uprising, ecopolitical activism, domestic violence, and the racialization of a nation. The project is currently in development with the National Film Board of Canada, produced by Justine Pimlott.

Selected Publications
Books

The Breaks. (Coffee House Press & Daunt Books Originals, forthcoming September 2021).

No Archive Will Restore You. (Punctum Books, 2018).

Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism & Decolonial Entanglements. Duke University Press, 2018.

Articles

“Dehumanist Education and the Colonial University,” co-authored with Nathan Snaza. Introduction to “Educational Undergrowth,” Social Text, Guest edited by Julietta Singh & Nathan Snaza, 39.1, 2021.

“Unthinking Mastery Symposium,” The Syndicate, published responses to interdisciplinary scholarly reflections on Unthinking Mastery.

No Archive Will Restore You: In Conversation with Barbara Browning and Julietta Singh,” Women & Performance 29.3, 2019.

“Errands for the Wild.” South Atlantic Quarterly. Forthcoming, 2018.

“Dehumanism & Disposability” Resilience. Forthcoming, 2018.

“Disposable Objects: Ethecology, Waste, and Maternal Afterlives.” Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 19.1 2018.

"Future Hospitalities." Cultural Critique. Issue 95: Winter 2017.

“Post-humanitarian Fictions.” Symploke. 23.1-2 (2015): 137-152.

"The Tail End of Disciplinarity." Journal of Postcolonial Writing. 49.4 (2013): 470-482.

"Between Food and the Body: Sara Suleri's Edible Histories." Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies. 16.2 (2009): 26-44.

Chapters

"Gandhi's Animal Experiments." Cosmopolitan Animals. Eds. Kaori Nagai, Karen Jons, Donna Landry, Monica Mattfeld, Caroline Rooney, and Charlotte Sleigh (Palgrave Animal Ethics Series, 2015).

Reviews

"Eat and Be Eaten: The Gastropolitics of the (Post) Colony." Review essay of Parama Roy's Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial.  Reviews in Cultural Theory. 2.1 (2011).

Education
Ph.D., University of Minnesota
Comparative Literature
M.A., McMaster University, Canada
English Literature
Contact Information
328 Humanities Building
(804) 289-8308
Areas of Expertise
Postcolonial Studies
Critical Theory
Transnational Feminisms
Queer Theory
Environmental Humanities