Fall 2017 seminars: Ph.D. candidate, English
Samuel Lagasse is a second-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at Cornell University. Lagasse earned his B.A. from Kenyon College, where he double-majored in English and religious studies. He works in the interdisciplinary field of diaspora studies, with a focus on Anglophone literature and critical theory. His interests include formations of modernity and modernist aesthetic practices, especially as they relate to issues of race, gender, and sexuality, and to the queer intimacies between African, Caribbean, and Asian subjects in diaspora. He is a member of the Institute for Comparative Modernities 2017–18 reading group, Queering the Archive. As a Mellon Urbanism Fellow, Lagasse is interested in tracing the emergence and transformation of critical modernities that cut across the discursive economies of migration and discrimination. His project will undertake a consideration of the ways in which in which formations of modernity "travel" in relation to the symbolic and representational frameworks of race, gender, and sexuality, particularly as these frameworks concern the figuration and interpellation of South Asian and African subjects in diaspora.