Briana Brickley

Student Fellow

Briana is a doctoral candidate in the English program at the CUNY Graduate Center, and a graduate teaching/writing fellow at Hunter College, where she has taught courses on twentieth century multi-ethnic American literature, minority discourse, critical theory, and postcolonial literature. She received a master’s degree in literature from New York University, and a bachelor of arts in English and Black Studies from UC Santa Barbara. Her current research focuses on various forms of inequality that get exaggerated under global capitalism—from the economic, to the corporeal, to the disciplinary—and employs the body as a critical analytic with which to read a contemporary, transnational literary archive. Drawing from theories of affect and embodiment, queer of color critique, feminist theory, aesthetic philosophy, and postcolonial theory, her teaching and scholarship address how the dematerializing trends of neoliberal multiculturalism manifest in institutional bodies, bodies of literature, and the literal bodies of contemporary subjects living under increasingly limited conditions of possibility and existence.

Participating Years

2014–2015

After Debt: New Forms of Dependency, Obligation, Risk, and Credit

‘After Debt’ imagines a world beyond debt and pursues it as a research agenda across a broad range of intellectual inquiry. How have economic failures been transformed into personal identities, often dividing those deemed “at risk” from those capable of assuming risk? How might we understand histories of debt within genealogies of the fiscal military nation-state? What alternate meanings of dependency, obligation, risk, and credit have people produced within and against debt regimes, such as those enforced by structural adjustment?