Biography
Alys Weinbaum
What do you do? My scholarship examines connections between human reproduction and ideologies of racism and nationalism in transatlantic literature and culture and focuses in on the historically shifting relationship among these concepts across the longue durée of racial capitalism. I am the author of The Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery: Biocapitalism and Black Feminism’s Philosophy of History (winner of the Sarah A. Whaley Book Prize of the National Women’s Studies Association and recipient of Honorable Mention for the Gloria Anzaldúa Prize), and Wayward Reproductions: Genealogies of Race and Nation in Transatlantic Modern Thought. I am also the co-editor of Reproductive Racial Capitalism (forthcoming 2026), The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization, and Next to the Color Line: Gender, Sexuality, and W. E. B. Du Bois. My current project, Reproductive Dystopia, examines the workings of a literary genre that, I argue, functions as a form of historiography.
How did the GNSS concentration shape your career? I majored in what was then called Women’s Studies when an undergraduate at Brown and returned at the end of my graduate studies to take up a postdoctoral fellowship at the Pembroke Center. My career as a feminist scholar and teacher has thus been indelibly shaped by both of these Brown experiences—by the amazing scholar/teachers whom I had the opportunity to study with when a student, and by the wonderful cohort of interlocutors who contributed to my thinking when I was a postdoc busily transforming my Ph.D dissertation into my first book. In short, the people and ideas I encountered at Brown over the years have traveled with me across time and space. As a Professor of English and Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies I am devoted to continuing to share feminist ideas with generations of students.