Debarati Biswas

Debarati Biswas is Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies at New York City College of Technology, CUNY, where she also coordinates the Black Visual Cultures Minor. Her research and teaching focus on the dynamic relationships between race, gender-sexuality, class, ability, and location in 20th and 21st Century Black and U.S. Ethnic literature and culture. Her first book manuscript, “The Perpetually Unsettled:  Aesthetics of Elsewheres and Queer Politics in Black American Literature and Culture, 1954-2018” explores the affective and embodied dimensions of blackness and queerness in carceral spaces such as the prison, inner city, and single room occupancy hotel. She serves on the Editorial Board of WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly and is the Co-Chair of the Board of Directors at CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the co-editor of Unbearable Being(s), a special issue of WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly. Her work also appears in journals such as Social Text, WSQ, Public Books, and Teen Vogue; as well as in the forthcoming anthology, The Parasitical Logic in Culture and Society, edited by Peter Hitchcock and published by Bloomsbury Academic. Biswas has also co-produced an award-winning docu-fictional webseries, Three Trembling Cities, on immigrants of color in NYC.