Dr. Míša Stekl (she/they) is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Race, Gender, and Ethnic Studies. They hold a PhD in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University (with PhD minors in Comparative Studies of Race & Ethnicity and in Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies), and they have previously served as the Artemis A.W. and Martha Joukowsky Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown University’s Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women.

Dr. Stekl’s current book project, “Accursed Races: (Anti)Blackness and Queer/Trans Modernity,” argues that modern Western understandings of queer and trans identity developed on the historical basis of anti-Black racial hierarchies. Stekl asks why dominant constructions of transness and queerness continually center white subjects, while measuring their sexual difference through historically racialized discourses, analogies, and fantasies. She traces these racialized models of gender and sexuality back to late 19th and early 20th-century sexology, before revealing how sexology’s scientific racism shaped 20th-century queer and trans cultures and literatures. While completing “Accursed Races,” Stekl is also working on several other projects, including: research on the racial histories behind psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theories of trans identity; essays on the place of non-binariness in the field imaginary of trans studies; and autotheoretical writing on raving and psychoanalysis. Their work appears or is forthcoming in Diacritics, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Deleuze and Guattari Studies, Rhizomes, and South Atlantic Review.

At CSU, Dr. Stekl teaches courses on Women’s Studies, Queer Studies, and Trans Studies, at their intersections with Black studies and critical theories of race and ethnicity.