Queering Modernist Translation: The Poetics of Race, Gender, and Queerness (2020) explores the works of Ezra Pound, Langston Hughes, and H.D. Queering translation, as I define it, is a theoretical lens that utilizes gender and queer studies to analyze the subversive spaces between languages. Theories such as shadow feminism and mixed orientation discussed by Jack Halberstam and Sara Ahmed, respectively, shed light on previously unexplored aspects of translation practices. In the book, I demonstrate how Pound, Hughes, and H.D. implement translation as a broader way of imagining global identities beyond rigid and fixed categorization. For example, Hughes’s translation of Federico García Lorca’s Romancero gitano draws attention to the ways in which Hughes uses translation as a study of the systematized oppression against Spain’s Romani community. In this manner, Now Sing recognizes the innovations and contributions to modernist literature of undervalued translators like H.D. and Hughes. Now Sing was funded by a Texas Graduate Student Grant, a Doctoral Student Tuition Fellowship, and a Presidential Fellowship at the University of Houston.

My second scholarly project involves an epistemological and genealogical study of bisexuality. Currently, bisexual theory concentrates its attention on a limited range of topics, like the western history of bisexuality, the systematic erasure of bisexual identity in art and in the media, or the relationship bisexuality has with the rest of the queer community. Instead of pursuing these avenues of inquiry, my study focuses on the critical and literary anxieties of bisexual theory, culture, and literature. These concerns, I argue, have created a groundlessness that, paradoxically, benefit the bisexual community and have helped generate new epistemologies about bisexuality and gender fluidity.

Even though contemporary bisexuality has a distinctively modern history that begins in the middle of the nineteenth century, bisexual theory has only recently emerged in the last thirty years. Because scholars like Steven Angelides have already laid out a history of contemporary bisexuality, my project begins by cataloguing the last thirty years of bisexual theory. By doing this, I draw attention to the critical anxieties upon which my project exposes later on.

Following this critical genealogy, I redirect the focus on twentieth- and twenty-first century literary and artistic representations of sexuality and the ways in which these representations reveal underlying fears about confronting sexual identities that do not adhere to the homo/hetero binary. I examine literature by Proust, Woolf, and Baldwin as well as films by Renoir, Fellini, and Sokurov. This part of the project also considers music by artists such as Arca and SOPHIE.

After these critical, literary, and artistic inquiries, I show that the anxieties concerning bisexuality have helped forge contemporary hermeneutic approaches to bisexuality, and instead of destabilizing bisexual identities, these theoretical and cultural anxieties have actually contributed to a surge in bisexual politics, epistemologies, and methodologies. Recalibrating critical lenses away from binary sexual identities not only reinforces inclusivity of sexuality differences, but it also demonstrates the interrelatedness of sexual identities and the ways in which these intersectionalities help us to understand and articulate our own sexual realities.

Early ideas from this project have been presented at MLA, and I plan to present this work at other national—and international—conferences. I will submit essays for publication at journals such as GLQ and the Journal of Bisexuality, among others.

This research, along with my first book-length project, draws on the interrelationships between transnational queer and gender theories, twentieth- and twenty-first centuries poetry and poetics, critical race theory, and translation studies. My work has the potential to examine areas of critical neglect, such as female and African-American translations during Modernism, and neglected periods in queer history and culture. These agendas enhance current discussions in these fields, with the opportunity for socio-cultural and political outreach that speaks to our moment in history.