Aren Aizura University of Minnesota, USA

Aren Aizura is an assistant professor in Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota, where he is affiliated with the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change. His research interests include queer theory, transgender studies, transnationality and immigration, and political economy and labor. Aizura earned a PhD in cultural studies from the University of Melbourne and was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers University in 2011-13. Aizura’s interdisciplinary research looks at how queer and transgender bodies shape and are shaped by technologies of race, gender, transnationality, medicalization and political economy. He is the co-editor of the Transgender Studies Reader 2, and his work has appeared in numerous journals and books, including Queer Necropolitics (Routledge, 2014) and Trans Studies: Beyond Homo/Hetero Normativities (Rutgers University Press, 2015). His current book project, Mobile Subjects: travel, transnationality and transgender lives, maps the figure of transsexual transition as a travel narrative. He is working on two other projects: a collection of essays on mobility, space, and transgender representation in film, and an ethnographic project on the transnational transgender rights and the politics of HIV in the humanitarian industrial complex.