Connor Spencer

I am a Ph.D. candidate in English and Comparative Literature. My research interests span queer and trans studies, 20th- and 21st-century American literary and visual cultures, historical materialism, aesthetics, the novel, realism, the history of sexuality, queer of color critique, and critical theory.

My dissertation is a study of articulations of gender-sexual specificities that I am calling "types." Curiously generic yet open to individual variation, types, as I understand them, are vernacular genres of gender-sexual life that mediate the individual subject's relationship to the social totality. Anchored in examinations of literary and visual artifacts from artists such as Henry James, Leslie Feinberg, and Alvin Baltrop––and buttressed by constellations of archival ephemera which include gender handbooks and glossaries, bar flyers, erotic magazines, newsletters, and internet mailing lists––my dissertation proposes a historical materialist approach to transformations in United States gender-sexual subjectivation through case studies of types such as the clone, the butch, the doll, the bachelor, and the bear. I am particularly interested in the relationship between these types and historical transition––how certain types slide out of survivability over time, or how they accrete new meanings and political valences in different historical conjunctures. My research has been supported by the Sarah Pettit Doctoral Fellowship in Lesbian Studies from Yale University, as well as the Phil Zwickler Memorial Research Grant from the Cornell University Human Sexuality Collection.

At Columbia, I am a Graduate Affiliate for the Columbia Research Initiative on the Global History of Sexualities, as well as the Rapporteur for the University Seminar in Literary Theory. Previously, I was a 2023-2024 Graduate Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender. With Levi Hord and Christine Prevas, I co-founded and co-convened the Trans and Queer Theory Colloquium in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. As a Curatorial Assistant for the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, I helped compose the research guide for a set of newly donated materials to the Amiri Baraka Papers and Audio-Visual Collection. 

I received my B.A. in English and American Literature from New York University, where I graduated as the valedictorian of my class. Before graduate school, I was a middle and high school English teacher.