LaVelle Ridley - 2023-2024 President's Postdoctoral Fellow
LaVelle Ridley is a 2023-2024 President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies working with Professor Eric Stanley. Dr. Ridley is a queer black transsexual writer and mentor whose interests emerge from the intersection of transgender studies, black feminist theory, and life writing studies. She earned her PhD in English & Women’s and Gender Studies from the University of Michigan.
Dr. Ridley’s research focuses on the radical cultural politics of black transgender women in the U.S. and advances an anti-capitalist, prison abolitionist alongside analyses of black trans women’s autobiographical narratives practices. She has published in academic journals such as GLQ, Feminist Studies, and TSQ, the latter for which she serves as Book Review Editor. Dr. Ridley is working on her book manuscript which articulates how life writing by black trans women functions as tools for political resistance and imaginative freedom-making for the gendered-racially-sexually oppressed in the United States. Alongside her academic work, Dr. Ridley serves as part of the editorial collective for Paradise on the Margins: Worldmaking by Trans Women of Color.
While in the Bay, Dr. Ridley will perform community-engaged work through multidisciplinary collaborations and the collection of oral histories of black trans women and trans women of color. Through archiving these stories, she will theorize cultural philosophies of trans women of color and connect them to ongoing movements for transformative justice.