Ronak Kapadia
Ronak Kapadia will present “Outer Views, or Palestine in the Sky: Arab Futurisms, Atmospheric Warfare, and Queer Cosmic Utopias” for QUEERtalks at 12:30 p.m. Friday, October 6, at the LGBT/Queer Studies and Services Institute, located in the Professional Development Annex (205 S. Main Street). At 12:15 p.m., participants can meet at the flagpole located at the north end of the ISU Quad to walk over to the event.
The fall series of QUEERtalks at Illinois State University focuses on new scholarship in the interdisciplinary field of LGBTQA/queer studies, with speakers presenting innovative work. This talk is part of the celebration of Queertober on campus.
Kapadia is an assistant professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. A cultural theorist of race, sex, and empire in the late 20th and early 21st century United States, Kapadia is completing a book about the interface between contemporary visual media and U.S. global counterinsurgency warfare in South Asia and the Middle East titled Insurgent Aesthetics: Race, Security, and the Sensorial Life of Empire. With Katherine McKittrick and Simone Browne, he is co-editor of the forthcoming special issue of Surveillance and Society on race and surveillance, and his work also appears in Asian American Literary Review, South Asian Diaspora, and Journal of Popular Music Studies.
Kapadia’s research has been supported by the NYU Henry MacCracken Fellowship, the Mellon/ACLS Fellowship, the Consortium for Faculty Diversity in the Liberal Arts Colleges, the NYU Dean’s Dissertation Award, the University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship, the UIC Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy Faculty Fellowship, and the UIC Great Cities Institute Faculty Scholarship. Kapadia received a Ph.D. in American Studies in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis from New York University
This event is sponsored by the Harold K. Sage Foundation and the Illinois State University Foundation Fund, and by MECCPAC—A Dean of Students Diversity Initiative.
This year’s co-sponsors of QUEERtalks are Illinois State’s Women’s and Gender Studies Program, the LGBT/Queer Studies and Services Institute, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Department of Philosophy, Department of English, Department of History, Department of Politics and Government, Latin American and Latino/a Studies, Pride, and The League of Extraordinary Genders (TLEG).
For additional information, contact the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at (309) 438-2947.
