Alys Eve Weinbaum

Alys Eve Weinbaum is Professor of English at the University of Washington, Seattle, and is affiliated in the departments of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies and Comparative History of Ideas. Her work explores the relationship between the concepts of race and human reproduction, and tracks how a range of cultural texts reflect and refract historically shifting articulations of these concepts. She is particularly concerned with histories of racial capitalism and the cultures and politics of human reproduction that subtend it. Her research and teaching stretch back to Atlantic slavery and forward into the present, building on and contributing to Marxist, feminist, and critical race theory. She is the author, most recently, of The Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery: Biocapitalism and Black Feminism’s Philosophy of History (2019)­­ which won the Sarah A. Whaley Prize of the National Women’s Studies Association and was recipient of an Honorable Mention for the Gloria Anzaldúa Prize. The book builds on her earlier study, Wayward Reproductions: Genealogies of Race and Nation in Transatlantic Modern Thought (2004). She is co-editor (with Jennifer Morgan) of a special issue of the journal History of the Present on “Reproductive Racial Capitalism”; co-author and co-editor with the Modern Girl Around the World Research Group of The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization (2008); and co-editor (with Susan Gillman) of Next to the Color Line:  Gender, Sexuality, and W. E. B. Du Bois (2007). Her current project treats dystopian fiction as a form of historiography that is uniquely positioned to afford new understandings of the processes through which the reproductive body and its labor are dispossessed, extracted and accumulated.