Alex Brostoff is assistant professor of English at Kenyon College, where they are associated faculty in Gender & Sexuality Studies, American Studies, and the Latinx Studies Concentration. An interdisciplinary scholar and translator, their research interests converge at the crossroads of genre-hybrid literatures, literary and critical theory, and trans and queer cultural production in twentieth and twenty-first century hemispheric American studies. Their first book, tentatively titled "Unruly Relations: A Critical Reframing of Autotheory," is under advance contract with Columbia University Press. It reframes autotheory as a subset of a transnational turn toward marginalized modes of theorizing. From a Third World Feminist "theory in the flesh" to Argentinian cultural criticism's "theory of the night," and from Brazilian marginal poetry's "body in heteronyms" to trans aesthetics in translation, this comparative study charts a politics of intertextual collectivity, recasting transnational structures of solidarity across the Américas.

They are the editor of two volumes: "Autotheories" (The MIT Press, 2025) with Vilashini Cooppan and "Reassignments: Trans and Sex from the Clinical to the Critical" (Fordham University Press, under advance contract) with rl Goldberg. They have also guest edited "Autotheory," a special issue of ASAP/Journal (2021) with Lauren Fournier and "Trans Literatures," a special issue of College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies (forthcoming, 2025) with rl Goldberg. They've translated a range of works from Spanish and Portuguese, including Indigenous activist Ailton Krenak's "Life Is Not Useful" (Polity Press, 2023) and "Ancestral Future" (Polity Press, 2024) in collaboration with Jamille Pinheiro Dias. Their scholarship, translations and public writing have appeared in journals such as Representations, Critical Times, Dibur, Synthesis, Assay, and Hyperallergic, as well as in edited collections, at the Museum of Modern Art and elsewhere. They serve as an associate editor of College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies.

In 2024, Brostoff was a visiting fellow at the Hunt-Simes Institute in Sexuality Studies through the Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Centre at the University of Sydney. Their work has been supported by the Professor Norman Jacobson Memorial Fellowship at the Townsend Center for the Humanities (2020-2021) and the Andrew W. Mellon-funded Cal Performances Grant (2015, 2017). They were honored to receive UC Berkeley's Lili Fabilli and Eric Hoffer Essay Prize (2021) and Kenyon's LGBTQ+ Faculty/Staff Advocate Award (2023).

Areas of Expertise

20th and 21st century hemispheric American studies; comparative literature; cultural studies; literary and critical theory; trans and queer studies; translation studies; autotheory

Education

2021 — Doctor of Philosophy from Univ. of California Berkeley

2013 — Master of Arts from University of Alabama

2009 — Bachelor of Arts from Sarah Lawrence College

Courses Recently Taught