Tommy Conners

Lecturer on the Committee on Degrees in History & Literature at Harvard University, where I teach on Latinx culture and history, legal studies, and queer studies. I received my Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and my B.A. in Spanish & Education from Ithaca College. I am interested in the fields of affect, queer, and critical race theories and US Latinx, Caribbean, and Latin American Studies. My book project, "Aesthetics of Colorblindness: Race & Sex in Latinx Literature," looks to US Latinx cultural production to trace how colorblind social discourse has rendered racial difference mute—as opposed to moot—while conversations of sexuality appear to take its place. I read works by Justin Torres, Carmen María Machado, Manuel Muñoz, and Salvador Plascencia, alongside legal cases like the 1948 miscegenation case Pérez v. Sharp and the 2010 Arizona Anti-Ethnic Studies Act, to argue that Latinx writing does what colorblind law refuses to do by apprehending race and indicting racism in the forms and feelings of queer narratives.