Agnes Malinowska

I received my Ph.D. from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago in 2018, and I’ve been working as a preceptor at MAPH since 2014. Before that, I earned a B.A. in philosophy and history from the University of California, Berkeley. My teaching and research center on American literature and culture from the late nineteenth century to the present, with an emphasis on histories of gender and sexuality as they intersect with race and class. I’m particularly interested in women’s cultural production and feminist political struggle around biological and social reproduction, motherhood and the politics of the home and family, and domestic and sexual labor. I am invested in analyzing U.S. cultures of reproduction in relation to biopolitical modes of regulating citizenship and national belonging—histories of eugenics and sterilization, slavery and racial segregation, immigration quotas and exclusion, settler colonialism and federal Indian policy. I also teach courses on queer and trans theoretical, literary, and cinematic explorations of history and temporality, affect, intimacy, trauma, and political struggles around sexuality. I focus in particular on how queer and trans theory and cultural production contest heteronormative imperatives around maturity, generation, marriage, and progress, insofar as they dictate what counts as a good life, a future worth having, or a history worth remembering. Finally, my research and teaching interests include the history of science, technology, and medicine as centered on the gendered and sexed body, particularly sexology and its afterlives, as well as histories of trans medicine, assisted reproductive technology, and birth control. I am a proud member of Faculty Forward/SEIU Local 73, the contingent faculty union at the University of Chicago.