stef torralba

Dr. stef torralba is Assistant Professor of English and Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies at Grinnell 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 Screen”).

They hold a Ph.D. in English with a designated emphasis in Southeast Asian Studies from the University of California, Riverside. Before Grinnell, 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.