Humanities and Social Studies Center, Room N3126
1226 Park St.
51²è¹İapp, IA 50112
United States
stef torralba
Dr. stef torralba is Assistant Professor of English and Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies at 51²è¹İapp College. Their pedagogy centers the intellectual lessons of queer studies; trans studies; queer and trans of color critique; crip and mad studies; critical and comparative race and ethnic studies; Asian American Studies; U.S. Latinx Studies; and transnational and decolonial Trans/Feminisms of Color.
Their research focuses on queer, trans, and mad of color aesthetics in contemporary literature; performance; and film, media, and visual culture. Their current book project, Brown Disorder: Feeling Close in Queer and Trans U.S. Filipinx and Chicanx Cultural Forms, theorizes “closeness†as a quotidian sensation, affect, and aesthetic that opens up otherwise possibilities for decolonial thinking and cross-ethnic relationality in late-20th and 21st-century expressive productions by gender- and sexual-variant U.S.-based Filipinx and Chicanx artists, writers, mediamakers, and performers. Their scholarly work appears or is forthcoming in Alon: Journal for Filipinx American and Diasporic Studies, Pacific Coast Philology, the forthcoming edited collection Beyond the X: Queer and Trans Filipinx Studies, and liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies (where they also guest co-edited a special issue on Black queer musical cinemas titled “Black and Queer, Music on Screenâ€).
They hold a Ph.D. in English with a designated emphasis in Southeast Asian Studies from the University of California, Riverside. Before 51²è¹İapp, they were Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Pomona College, where they also created and taught new courses for the Gender and Women’s Studies, American Studies, Asian American Studies, and Chicanx/Latinx Studies programs and departments.
Education and Degrees
Ph.D. in English with a designated emphasis in Southeast Asian Studies, University of California, Riverside (2023)
Selected Publications
Refereed Journal Articles
“Textures of Other Dimensions: An Interview with Alexander G. Weheliye.†liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies, vol. 7, no. 1, 2023, p. 110-124.
“‘This Sort of Palace Revolt’: Failure and the American Nation in William Greaves’s Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One.†Pacific Coast Philology, vol. 56, no. 1, 2021, p. 120-134.
Refereed Book Chapters
“Corny Aesthetics and Kiam Marcelo Junio’s American Karaoke.†Beyond the X: Queer and Trans Filipinx Studies (Forthcoming)