Jovan Moses

Jovan Moses, Joint Dissertation Fellow

Jovon M. Moses is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Chicago. Their research spans an array of fields, including trans* and queer studies, Indigenous studies, Black feminist thought, and Black ecologies. Their dissertation project, “Black Transfeminist Ecologies: A Litany of Loose Objects”, explores the ecological as an interstitial site of black, trans*, and indigenous speculation, reworking the conditions of relationality to strain and put pressure on humanist modes of identity and belonging. Through a Wynterian and Berlantian interpretation of race and gender as “code words” for genre, they aim to interrogate the condition of staying in desirous, yet deleterious relation to objects such as these and propose a “loose” association of objects as an otherwise orientation to “making good relation.” The dissertation shores up tensions in Black studies, Indigenous studies at large, and Trans studies, returning to the stymied site of the relational antagonism with renewed fervor for an ecological modality attendant to but not overdetermined by coloniality and slavery. 

Alongside their academic work, Jovon maintains an exploratory filmic practice that explores the anarchic capacity of Black Spirit. She holds a B.A. in English and Linguistics from Emory University and an M.A. in English from the University of Chicago.