Anna C. Ziering

Graduate Student

English

About

Anna Ziering is an English PhD candidate at the University of Connecticut, where she has completed graduate certificates in American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She also holds an MA from UConn (2017), an MFA from Boston University (2015), and a BA from Barnard College (2011). Her writing, published in MELUS and The Black Scholar, has received the Susan Porter Benson Graduate Research Award (2020) and the Aetna Graduate Critical Writing Award (2017). In 2021-2022, she is a UCHI Fellow, a PEO Public Scholar, and a recipient of the Wood/Raith Gender Identity Living Trust Fellowship. Her work has also been recognized by the American Association of University Women.

Her research and teaching interests include 

• 20th and 21st Century American Literature
• Queer Theory and Queer of Color Critique
• Black Feminisms
• Multi-Ethnic Literature
• American Studies
• Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Her dissertation project, “Dirty Forms: Masochism and the Revision of Power in Multi-Ethnic U.S. Literature,” engages masochism as a mode of reckoning with histories of racial trauma and imagining and enacting more equitable worlds. The project constructs a wide literary and pop culture archive, and argues that as both an erotic practice and a narrative form, masochism serves as a site for the theorization, rehearsal, and construction of new, more just modes of power.

Specialties

American Literature—20th Century to Present, Ethnic American Literature.