Kendall Dinniene

 

Biography

My research focuses broadly on the relationship between race, gender, health, and nonnormative embodiment in 20^th and 21^st century multi-ethnic US literature and film.

I am currently completing my first book project, titled Fat Fictions: Racializing Narratives of Fatness in American Literature and Culture. This project examines how some American authors reveal that tropes of bodily excess are inherently entangled with and productive of ideas about race.

My next book project, Black Fat Feminisms, traces the links between Black women’s fiction and 20^th century Black feminist activism. Using archival research as well as close readings, I show how Black feminists incorporated a fat politics as part of broader activist and intellectual work toward Black liberation.

 

Current Role

Hughes Postdoctoral Fellow

 

Dissertation Title

"The Fault of Our Forms: Fatness & Race in 20th- and 21st-Century American Literature & Culture" 

 

Area of Expertise

• 20^th and 21^st century American Literature

• African American Literature
• Latinx Literatures

• Fat Studies

• Ethnic Studies

• Black Feminist Theory

• Critical Disability Studies

• Queer and Trans Studies

 

Selected Publications

“‘On being fat’: Toward a Black Fat Feminist Politics of Limitlessness,” accepted for inclusion in a volume edited by Jennifer C. Nash and Mishana Garschi.

“Wounding the Heteropatriarchy: Queer and Disabled Histories inForgetting the Alamo andCaballero,” forthcoming inStudies in American Fiction.

“‘A Sensual People, and Doomed’: Anti-Fatness and/as Anti-Mexican Racism in America’s First Mass Medium,”Ethnic Studies Review, vol. 47, no. 2-3, 2024,
pp. 3–20.

“‘My Heart’s Fine as Long as My Stomach’s Not Empty’: Patriarchal Violence, Women’s Excess, and Fat Liberation inCriminally Insane,”Fat Studies, vol. 13, no. 1, 2024, pp. 22-35.

 

Selected Honors, Awards, and Fellowships

2024 Black Feminist Theory Summer Institute, Duke University

2024 Los Angeles Review of Books Summer Publishing Workshop Fellow

2024 Summer Research and Writing Fellowship, Dedman College Interdisciplinary Institute, SMU

2024 Outstanding Graduate Student Instruction Award, Moody Graduate School, SMU

2023 Nina Schwartz Graduate Student Teaching Award, English Department, SMU