What brings Sunhay You back to Duke?
Sunhay You is the new Duke Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. She recently finished her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan in the joint English and Women's and Gender Studies Ph.D. She was previously an undergraduate student at Duke and graduated in 2013 with degrees in English and Women's Studies.
She comes to Duke because of the exciting work happening in regard to the erotics of race and coloniality, in conversation with Professor Jennifer Nash, Professor Anna Storti, and Professor Pete Sigal in the department.
What will she teach at Duke?
Sunhay You is incredibly excited to teach a class for Duke undergraduates in the spring of 2022 that "thinks about sexual agencies and desires of people in the past and how that inflects our present moment" in order to study the "histories of race and coloniality" and how they manifest as "projects of sexuality."
How will her research change?
Sunhay You plans to expand her dissertation by examining spirituality in relation to Asian/American women's desire and sexuality, which has often been under-theorized in gender and sexuality studies.
Given colonial impositions of heteronormativity and heteropatriarchal postcolonial nationalism, You asks, "what are the ways that Asian women draw on spiritual logics and concepts to resist and response to those forces?"
Biography
Sunhay You is this year's Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies Postdoctoral fellow at Duke University, under the theme "Erotics of Race and Coloniality." She received her Ph.D. in English and Women's & Gender Studies at the University of Michigan where she also received the distinguished Pre-doctoral and Humanities Research fellowships for her dissertation on Asian/American women's eroticism. She will be teaching a course entitled "Impossible Pleasures" in the Spring of 2022.
Gender, Sexuality Feminist Studies