Kyla Wazana Tompkins, “Deviant Matter: Ferment, Intoxication, Jelly, Rot.”

Kyla Wazana Tompkins is professor and chair of the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies at Buffalo University. She is the author of the James Beard Award-winning essay “On Boba,” and the author of Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century and the forthcoming Deviant Matter: Ferment, Intoxicants, Jelly, Rot, as well as co-editor of Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies (A Choice Outstanding Academic Title). Her essay for Avidly —“We’re Not Here to Learn What We Already Know” — has been downloaded over 700,000 times and is widely assigned in gender studies and the critical humanities as a guide to asking questions well.

This event is part of the 2024-25 Tucker-Boatwright Festival of Literature and the Arts, “The Nature of Representation,” hosted by the English Department, and it is aligned with the Humanities Center theme question, “How (and why) do we represent nature.” The UR Humanities Centeroffers public events as well as intensive research and community-building programs, guided by our mission to collate and amplify humanities study. Please subscribe to the Humanities Newsletter to keep up with Center activities, and follow URHumanities on Instagram.