Xine discusses her theorization of unfeeling drawn from her book Disaffection: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America. The talk contextualizes her work as a wider intervention into the racial and sexual politics of disaffection on the level of theory, citation, the humanities, and how
we approach feeling and unfeeling in our research, teaching, and everyday lives. Inspired by Eugenia Zuroski’s insightful exercise on ‘where do you know from?’ Xine considers how her work on unfeeling is informed by her position as a non-Black settler of colour born and raised in so-called Toronto, on the
traditional territories of the Mississauga and Haudenosaunee nations.

Speakers

Dr. Xine Yao is Lecturer in American Literature to 1900 as well as co-director of the queer studies network qUCL at University College London. Their first book is Disaffected:The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America which has won Duke University Press’s Scholars of Color First Book Award (Duke UP 2021). Her honours include the American Studies Association’s Yasuo Sakakibara Essay Prize and their research has been supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She is a BBC Radio 3/AHRC New Generation Thinker and the co-host of PhDivas Podcast.