A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.

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Kirin Wachter-Grene

Assistant Professor

Contact

Personal Statement

Kirin Wachter-Grene is Assistant Professor and Coordinator of the First Year Seminar Program in the Department of Liberal Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Washington with a focus on 19th -21st century African American literature and gender and sexuality studies. She joined SAIC in 2018, having taught previously at New York University, Bard College, and the University of Washington. She teaches classes on Black feminism, BIPOC literature, sexuality, censorship, and spectatorship.

Dr. Wachter-Grene was the 2017-18 Visiting Scholar at the Leather Archives and Museum (LA&M). While at the LA&M she conducted research into Black women’s historical, manifold involvement with leather, kink, and fetish communities. Her LA&M research informed At the Limits of Desire: Black Radical Pleasure, a special issue of The Black Scholar she guest-edited in honor of the journal’s 50th Anniversary (50.2). She is currently co-editing a special followup, double-issue titled Unsafe Words: Black Radical Pleasure II (53.3/4, 2023). Dr. Wachter-Grene currently sits on the Active Editorial Board of The Black Scholar. She has published peer-reviewed articles and reviews in scholarly journals including African American Review, The Black Scholar, Callaloo, Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, and Feminist Formations, and she occasionally writes on Chicago-based arts events for Sixty Inches from Center. Currently, she is working on her manuscript titled Black Kenosis: The Erotic Undoing of African American Literature (under contract with Fordham University Press).

Writing Samples

"Teaching Three Copies of 'Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe'"

Iola Leroy's "Long, Long Ago" Song

"Black Radical Pleasure"

"Caretaking in So Many Ways: A Conversation with Mistress Velvet"

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

We live in a world we didn¿t create. But we innovate how to exist within it. This Scholar¿s blended academic/studio symposium course explores what it might mean to ¿queer¿ space through installation strategies. Installation art is the desire to transform the perception of space to produce new experiences. What could it look like and feel like to take up space while simultaneously making room with others and for others? Together, we will explore these questions through the lens of feminist and queer historical texts that archive radical experiments, aspirations, and failures in kinship, collectivity, and utopian world building efforts. Additional readings will look at affect theory, disorientation, desire, accessibility, and community-building. Students are expected to keep up with the reading weekly and to come to class ready to write about it and discuss it in depth. Studio work, solo and group, will explore and transform space through different techniques such as the arrangement of found/rescued objects, soundscape, light manipulation, video projection, smell, activation via performance, haptic textures, and other modes of site-specific strategies. Artists in focus will include Allyson Mitchell, Nayland Blake, Tiona Nekkia Mcclodden, Jacolby Satterwhite, Chris E. Vargas, Ernesto Pujol, Kang Seung Lee, AK Burns/Katherine Hubbard, and more.

Class Number

2051

Credits

3

Description

We live in a world we didn¿t create. But we innovate how to exist within it. This Scholar¿s blended academic/studio symposium course explores what it might mean to ¿queer¿ space through installation strategies. Installation art is the desire to transform the perception of space to produce new experiences. What could it look like and feel like to take up space while simultaneously making room with others and for others? Together, we will explore these questions through the lens of feminist and queer historical texts that archive radical experiments, aspirations, and failures in kinship, collectivity, and utopian world building efforts. Additional readings will look at affect theory, disorientation, desire, accessibility, and community-building. Students are expected to keep up with the reading weekly and to come to class ready to write about it and discuss it in depth. Studio work, solo and group, will explore and transform space through different techniques such as the arrangement of found/rescued objects, soundscape, light manipulation, video projection, smell, activation via performance, haptic textures, and other modes of site-specific strategies. Artists in focus will include Allyson Mitchell, Nayland Blake, Tiona Nekkia Mcclodden, Jacolby Satterwhite, Chris E. Vargas, Ernesto Pujol, Kang Seung Lee, AK Burns/Katherine Hubbard, and more.

Class Number

1662

Credits

3

Description

This course addresses sexuality and the erotics of interclass contact from the end of the 1960s through the present, with an emphasis on LGBTQ+ within a historical nexus of urban life, architecture, law, and struggles for civil rights. In what ways are our sexual lives produced, mediated, and disciplined by publics (and what are 'publics'?). Readings include Samuel R. Delany, Lauren Berlant, Michael Warner, Pat Califia, Gayl Rubin, David Wojnarowicz, Michel Foucault, Jeffrey Weeks, Laud Humphries, Tim Dean, Mireille Miller-Young, and more. We will also learn from guest speakers involved in the leather, kink, and fetish communities. Students can expect to read between 50-75 pages of critical and theoretical material per week and to write about and discuss texts in depth. Students will also take turns as discussion leaders.

Class Number

1729

Credits

3

Description

BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) writers have used SF¿which stands for speculative fiction (science fiction, horror, and fantasy)¿to imagine alternative worlds for centuries. In this class we will closely consider such texts¿ visions of race and ethnicity, sexuality, gender, power, and worldbuilding by situating them within the social, political, and historical contexts of their time. How do these texts¿some written by writers from marginalized groups who have already survived or are daily surviving apocalypse¿represent self-determined visions of resistance, decolonization, abolition, environmental justice, and interspecies solidarity? Fictional texts will include work by Larissa Lai, Octavia Butler, Nnedi Okorafor, Rebecca Roanhorse, Neon Yang, N.K. Jemisin, and more. Students should expect to read, on average, 75 pages per week and to write about and discuss texts in depth. Students should also expect to take turns as discussion leaders. For their final project, students will write an argumentative essay or develop a creative project with a written reflective component inspired by concepts central to the texts but pertaining to a topic of their choosing.

Class Number

2255

Credits

3

Description

What happens when science fiction literature encounters architecture? Worlds Collide! Whether as setting, character, or plot element, the architecture of cities, buildings, and spaces carry forward key themes of the genre including ecology and climate change; technology, bodies, and artificial intelligence; and migration and encounters with the Other. Considering the architecture of science fiction informs understanding of the complex cultural contexts in which both buildings and literature get made. Course readings will focus on selections from major works by authors Stanislaw Lem, Larissa Lai, and Charlie Jane Anders. Secondary material may include short stories, critical essays, art, architecture, film, and other contemporaneous cultural production. Course work will comprise close readings of major texts focusing on both literary and architectural analysis; in-class writing and student-led class discussion; and site-based installation projects.

Class Number

2236

Credits

3

Description

What happens when science fiction literature encounters architecture? Worlds Collide! Whether as setting, character, or plot element, the architecture of cities, buildings, and spaces carry forward key themes of the genre including ecology and climate change; technology, bodies, and artificial intelligence; and migration and encounters with the Other. Considering the architecture of science fiction informs understanding of the complex cultural contexts in which both buildings and literature get made. Course readings will focus on selections from major works by authors Stanislaw Lem, Larissa Lai, and Charlie Jane Anders. Secondary material may include short stories, critical essays, art, architecture, film, and other contemporaneous cultural production. Course work will comprise close readings of major texts focusing on both literary and architectural analysis; in-class writing and student-led class discussion; and site-based installation projects.

Class Number

2237

Credits

3