Dr Alex Brostoff
Postdoctoral Fellow, January - June 2025
Home institution: Kenyon College
Alex Brostoff is Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College, where they are affiliated faculty in Gender and Sexuality Studies, American Studies, and the Latinx Studies Concentration. An interdisciplinary scholar and translator, their work converges at the crossroads of genre-hybrid literatures, literary and critical theory, and trans and queer cultural production in modern and contemporary hemispheric American studies. Their first book, Unruly Relations: A Critical Reframing of Autotheory, is under advance contract with Columbia University Press. They are also the co-editor of two volumes: Autotheories (The MIT Press, 2025) and Reassignments: Trans and Sex from the Clinical to the Critical (Fordham University Press, under advance contract), as well as the co-editor of “Autotheory,” a special issue of ASAP/Journal (2021) and “Trans Literatures,” a special issue of College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies (2025). They have translated a range of works from Spanish and Portuguese, including Indigenous leader Ailton Krenak’s Life Is Not Useful (Polity Press, 2023) and Ancestral Future (Polity Press, 2024). Their scholarship and translations have appeared in ASAP/Journal, Critical Times, Synthesis, Dibur, and South Atlantic Quarterly, as well as at the Museum of Modern Art, and elsewhere. They received their PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley in 2021.
Project title: Unruly Relations: A Critical Reframing of Autotheory
At IASH, Brostoff will be working on their first book, a critical reframing of autotheory’s transnational and transdisciplinary place in the political history of trans and queer literary production.