Tavi Gonzalez
Barbara Morris Caspersen Associate Professor of Humanities and Associate Professor of English
Links
Queer literary studies, including representations of HIV/AIDS; transatlantic Modernism, including the Harlem Renaissance; and the 20C Novel.
Octavio R. Gonzalez is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Wellesley College. He teaches courses on American queer literature and culture, British and American modernism, and the twentieth century novel. Such courses include The Harlem Renaissance; Sapphic Modernism; The Gay 1990s; and Writing AIDS, 1981-Present.
His monograph, Misfit Modernism: Queer Forms of Double Exile in the Twentieth-Century Novel, was recently published in the Refiguring Modernism imprint from Pennsylvania State University Press (September 2020). His first poetry collection, The Book of Ours, was a selection of the chapbook series at Letras Latinas, University of Notre Dame (Momotombo Press, 2009). He is currently working on a second poetry manuscript, entitled “Limerence: The Wingless Hour.” Some poems from this collection appear in Lambda Literary’s Poetry Spotlight, Anomaly, La Guagua, and the “Taboo” series at La Casita Grande Salon, as well as an anthology of Dominican poets in the diaspora (Retrato intimo de poetas dominicanos, https://amzn.to/2Sz051V). Other poems appear in Puerto del Sol, OCHO, and MiPoesias, among other journals. You can follow him on Twitter @TaviRGonzalez.
Education
- B.A., Swarthmore College
- M.A., Pennsylvania State University-Main Campus
- M.A., Rutgers University-New Brunswick
- Ph.D., Rutgers University-New Brunswick
Current and upcoming courses
Poetry
ENG202
A workshop in the writing of short lyrics and the study of the art and craft of poetry.
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Susan Sontag
ENG353
Susan Sontag is the most famous of the New York Intellectuals. And, besides her essay on Camp, which garnered Sontag a TIME magazine feature at the ripe old age of 31, she is known for major critical interventions in the history of ideas: Against Interpretation (1966), On Photography (1977), Illness as Metaphor (1978), AIDS and Its Metaphors (1988), and Regarding the Pain of Others (2003). Her mature fiction includes the historical novel The Volcano Lover (1992) and The Way We Live Now (1991). The latter is an indelible story about the early AIDS crisis. Sontag’s intellectual breadth explores important themes such as the history of illness from antiquity to postmodernity, including cancer and HIV/AIDS; the nature of a postmodern social world governed by visual culture, by the empire of the image; and the representation of war and war crimes, such as torture (Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib), and other social calamities. Sontag is also known for her on-the-ground advocacy during the Siege of Sarajevo, where she directed a production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot while bullets flew across the city. This seminar will focus on these varied texts and genres and areas of intellectual inquiry, while we explore the complex legacy of the most influential public intellectual and cultural critic of the late 20th C. As a TSSL Course, Sontag will culminate in public lectures presented by seminarians at the end of the semester.