Alex Brostoff
Georgetown University
Alex Brostoff is Assistant Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at Georgetown University, where they are Affiliated Faculty in Global and Comparative Literature and the Center for Latin American Studies. An interdisciplinary scholar and translator, they study how trans and queer cultural production negotiates and recasts the relationship between self-figuration and decolonial critique. Their first book, The Autotheory Effect: Hemispheric Returns and the Grammar of Relation, is forthcoming with Columbia University Press. They are co-editor of two volumes: Autotheories (The MIT Press, 2025) and Reassignments: Trans and Sex from the Clinical to the Critical (Fordham University Press, forthcoming 2027). In addition to guest editing special issues of ASAP/Journal on autotheory (2021) and College Literature on trans literatures (2025), Brostoff has translated a range of literary nonfiction and critical theory from Spanish and Portuguese, including Indigenous leader Ailton Krenak's Ancestral Future (Polity Press, 2024) and the late Brazilian activist Nêgo Bispo’s The Earth Gives, The Earth Wants (Polity Press, 2026). Their scholarship and translations have appeared in Diacritics, Representations, TSQ, Synthesis, Critical Times, and South Atlantic Quarterly, as well as at the Museum of Modern Art and elsewhere.
Ph.D. Comparative Literature, Designated Emphasis on Gender, Women, and Sexuality, University of California Berkeley
- Autotheories, co-edited with Vilashini Cooppan (The MIT Press, 2025), including the co-authored editorial introduction "Articulating Autotheories"
- “Rage Against the Disciplines: The Monstrous Returns of Trans Aesthetics,” Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 53.2 (2025): 94-117.
- “Trans Literatures,” co-edited with rl Goldberg. College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies 52.4 (Fall 2025), including the co-authored editorial introduction “Whose Trans Literatures? Toward a Reproductive and Redistributive Reading.”
- “An Autotheory of Intertextual Kinship: Ambivalent Bodies in the Work of Maggie Nelson and Paul Preciado” in the special issue “Dissident Self-Narratives: Radical and Queer Life Writing,” ed. Aude Haffen. Synthesis: An Anglophone Journal of Comparative Literary Studies 14 (2021): 91-115.
- “Autotheory,” co-edited with Lauren Fournier. ASAP/Journal 6.2 (September 2021) including the co-authored editorial introduction "Autotheory ASAP! Academia, Decoloniality, and 'I'"
Selected Translations
- Antônio Bispo dos Santos, The Earth Gives, the Earth Wants, co-translated with Jamille Pinheiro Dias (Polity Press, Critical South Series, forthcoming September 2026).
- Ailton Krenak, Ancestral Future, co-translated with Jamille Pinheiro Dias (Polity Press, Critical South Series, 2024).
- Emanuela Borzacchiello, Marisa Belausteguigoitia, and Rían Lozano “Strikes, Stoppages, Occupations: Mexican Feminist Writing on the Walls,” Critical Times: Interventions in Global Critical Theory 5.2 (August 2022): 444-474.
- Daniel Lie, “Dife and Leath: Time Rots,” edited by Wong Binghao in “The Americas: Transnational Histories and Non-Aligned Networks,” Museum of Modern Art (October 19, 2022).