
Heidi Rhodes,
Visiting Assistant Professor in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Politics
FGSS
Biography
- Professor Rhodes is a scholar, poet, and cultural worker. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, Feminist Studies, and Disability Studies Quarterly; as well as POETRY, Waxwing, and Foglifter. She was a Spring 2021 Mellon Arts Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration, and a Translating Race Postdoctoral Fellow at Tufts University's Center for the Humanities. She has taught at Tufts University, Brooklyn College, and NYU.
Academic History
- B.A. UC Berkeley
- M.A. Political Theory, Graduate Center, City University of New York
- Ph.D. Political Theory, Graduate Center, City University of New York
Academic Focus
- My research focuses on histories of violence, feminist thought, decolonial politics and aesthetics, disability thought and poetics, and alternative epistemologies. I am also a poet whose creative writing is influenced deeply by my research, and whose research is deeply informed by poetry.
Courses Taught
- FGSS 026 SC - Introduction to Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies
- POLI187M SC-01 - Feminist Political Thought (Freedom Dreams and Feminist Utopias: Decolonial Politics and Aesthetics)
Work
- Professor Rhodes is author of The Inheritance of Haunting (University of Notre Dame press, 2019), a collection of poems on the themes of inter-generational and collective inheritances of historical memory and postcolonial trauma.
- Her current book projects include, "Infinite Latitude: Speculative Geographies in the Afterlife of Discovery", which considers the Colombian armed conflict as an extension of histories of capitalism and settler colonialism; and a co-authored book of queer-of-color disability thought.
- Selected Book Chapters and Journal Articles:
- “Bed/Life: Chronic Illness, Postcolonial Entanglements, and Queer Intimacy in the Stay,” in Origins, Objects, and Orientations: Towards a Racial History of Disability Special Issue, Disability Studies Quarterly, (forthcoming 2022.)
- “Bridging/Broken in the Break,” co-written with Tala Khanmalek, Feminist Studies, Special Issue, 40th Anniversaries of This Bridge Called My Back and All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave, (forthcoming 2022.)
- “Defense Strategies” in Falsework, Smalltalk: Political Education, Aesthetic Archives, Recitations of a Future in Common. Edited by Asma Abbas and Colin Eubanks, Curated by the Hic Rosa Collective. Richmond, MA: Some Beloved Books, 2021.
- “Choreography of the Body’s Collapse: The Anti-Capitalist Politics of Rest,” Rest and the Rest: Aesthetics of Idleness Issue, in InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal of Visual Culture, April 25, 2021. https://www.invisibleculturejournal.com/pub/choreography-bodys-collapse/release/1
- “Impossible Word: Toward a Poetics of Aphasia”, Poetry, October 2020. Winner of the 2021 Editors Prize for an Essay, Poetry Magazine. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/154200/impossible-word-toward-a-poetics-of-aphasia
- “A Decolonial Feminist Epistemology of the Bed: A Compendium Incomplete of Sick and Disabled Queer Brown Femme Bodies of Knowledge”, co-written with Tala Khanmalek, Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, Special Issue on decolonial feminisms, edited by Wanda Alarcón, Dalida Maria Benfield, Annie Isabel Fukushima, Marcelle Maese, Vol. 41, No. 1, May 2020: 35-58.
- “The Blood that Has Dried in the Codes: Sovereignty, Right, and the (Im)possibilities of Freedom,” in Diverse Unfreedoms: The Afterlives and Transformations of Post-TransAtlantic Bondages, edited by Sarada Balagopalan, Cati Coe, and Keith Michael Green, New York: Routledge, 2020.
- Selected Poetry:
- ‘Broken Body Alluvium’ and ‘Sonnet for the Study of Extreme Illusion Machined into the Highest Degree of Sacredness,’ Indiana Review (forthcoming, 2022.)
- ‘heart of the bell’ (reprint), Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology, (Pittsburgh: Autumn House Press, April 2022.)
- ‘Quantum Subversion Ghazal Beginning with the Violence of Rice and Moving on to a Never Ending Rise,’ ‘inherit the kingdom,’ & ‘American Ugly,’ Tupelo Quarterly, Summer 2021. https://www.tupeloquarterly.com/tag/heidi-andrea-restrepo-rhodes/
- 'A Lyric Astronomy,' Sick Magazine, July 2021.
- ‘Blessed Are Thou Amongst,’ Boston Review, July 2, 2021. https://bostonreview.net/articles/blessed-are-thou-amongst/
- 'Amidst the Riots for Blue to Mean No Longer Forbidden the Very Air,' 'every exquisite thing,' '& I will be every moving thing that lives, which shall be meat for you,' and 'little strange spread-eagled giving things', Waxwing, February.
- ‘them bodies never saints’ and ‘let me count the signs of life amidst the planet’s dying’, Foglifter, Issue 5.2, October 2020.
Awards and Honors
- ACADEMIC AWARDS AND HONORS
- 2020-2021, Harrison Award for Dissertation Completion, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
- 2019, Lennihan Arts and Sciences Grant, The Futures Initiative, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
- 2019, Doctoral Student Research Grant, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
- 2017, Doctoral Student Research Grant, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
- 2015-2020, Graduate Fellowship Award, Political Science Department, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
- CREATIVE AWARDS & FELLOWSHIPS
- 2022, Zoeglossia Fellowship
- 2021, Yale University Mellon Arts and Practitioners Fellowship, Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration
- 2020, Palm Beach Poetry Festival CantoMundo Fellow.
- 2019, CantoMundo Fellow.
- 2018, VONA (Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation) Poetry Fellow.
- 2018, Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize