University of California, Davis
Post-Doc, Cultural Studies and Spanish
UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow
University of California, Davis (Cultural Studies and Spanish)
Thesis Title: Dissertation Title: "Remembering Trauma in a Time of War: The Psycho-Affective Economies of Neoliberalism and the Radical Imagination of Dissent."
Angela Y. Davis and Neferti Tadiar (co-chairs)
Anna Agathangelou, Lisa Rofel, Juan Poblete (committee members)
About
In 2009, Tamara Lea Spira received her PhD in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies Departments at UC Santa Cruz. She is currently a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Davis in the Departments of Cultural Studies and Spanish. Her research interests include feminist, queer and postcolonial theory, critical theories of race, sexuality and subjectivity, critical prison studies, transformative justice, revolutionary literatures and the cultural politics of neoliberalism in the Americas. Her dissertation, which she is currently turning into a book manuscript, theorizes the affective economies of neoliberalism in through a transnational study of radical feminist imaginations which take form within unlikely spaces in (post)revolutionary Chile and the United States.
During her tenure as a Postdoctoral Fellow, Tamara is also involved in two additional research projects: The first, "Neoliberal Captivities," treats the history of a prison in Northern Chile, which intermittently served as a concentration camp for leftists and “sexual dissidents” throughout the twentieth century and was converted into a hotel after the formal transition to democracy in 1990. Her second project, "Revolutionary Trauma and the Suspension in Mourning," is a book-length project that examines the relationship between legacies of dictatorship in the Southern Cone and the rise of Zionism to further theorize the affective logics of contemporary formations of empire.
Tamara has also worked as a labor and community organizer and is currently involved in collective struggles against mass incarceration in California and its surrounding economies of war, transnationally. Her selected publications include “Intimate Investments: Homonormativity, Global Lockdown, and the Seductions of Empire” (co-authors Agathangelou and Bassichis, The Radical History Review, 2008); “Global Sexualities, Transnational Desires: Towards an International Sexuality Studies in a Time of Empire” (Blackwell, forthcoming) and essays in the anthologies Transnational Resistance: Experience and Experiment in Contemporary Women’s Writing (forthcoming) and Sustainable Feminisms (co-author Agathangelou, Elsevier, 2004).
Tamara welcomes correspondence from those with similar scholarly and political interests and invites inquiries for potential collaborations.
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