Sam King-Shaw

Sam King-Shaw smiling.

Sam King-Shaw is a PhD Candidate and Gender Institute Dissertation Fellow at UB. Their dissertation, "Cross-Temporal Encounters: Twentieth-Century Black Queer Aesthetic Practices and Speculative Relationality," examines twentieth-century Black queer cultural production, weaving together close visual and textual analysis and a creative archival practice.

By bringing multiple Black queer temporalities into intimate and speculative contact, Sam's dissertation aims to develop a theory of futurity that frames Black queer aesthetic practices as offering resources to envision and enact alternative futures for thriving Black queer lives. 

Meet More Students

  • Elizabeth Mellors
    9/17/26
    Elizabeth Mellors is focused on researching anti-fatness, a discipline that encourages the critical thought of body size in intersection with race, sexuality, class, and disability studies. They are interested in exploring the unconventional temporality at which fat women experience life, romance, and sexuality by examining contemporary American television shows.
  • Kailey McDonald
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    Kailey is a PhD student interested in the interplay between the political imaginary and the transformative power of language. Her research focuses on imagining political alternatives to neoliberal, neocolonial capitalism.
  • Grisha Mainali
    9/17/26
    Grisha is a feminist scholar who is interested in studying Women’s Movement in Nepal. Nepali women’s movements, like the MeToo movement, are absent from the scholarship. Grisha's research addressed this gap by documenting the Nepali MeToo movement through a critical discourse analysis of published news articles.
  • Mary Lyn Nutting
    9/17/26
    Mary Lyn Nutting's research focuses on artists' and activists' use of dolls as a medium to confront social injustice, with a special interest in how care work is enacted through the creation of art.
  • Joyce Jekayinoluwa
    9/17/26
    Joyce Jekayinoluwa's research examines how universities in Nigeria and the US respond to sexual and gender-based violence, and whether those responses actually mean anything to the students they are supposed to protect.
  • Sam King-Shaw
    9/17/26
    Sam King-Shaw is a PhD Candidate and Gender Institute Dissertation Fellow at UB. Their dissertation, "Cross-Temporal Encounters: Twentieth-Century Black Queer Aesthetic Practices and Speculative Relationality," examines twentieth-century Black queer cultural production, weaving together close visual and textual analysis and a creative archival practice.
  • Asiyah Noujdi
    8/28/26
    Asiyah Noujdi's research focuses on the way that contemporary media representations of marginalized peoples, with a focus on trans women, affects societal depictions and attitudes towards marginalized peoples within the contemporary media and socio-cultural landscape.
  • Kit Lam
    9/17/26
    Kit is a PhD student, and their research interests surround issues of interracial solidarity in social movements, with a particular interest in Asian-Black solidarity in the COVID era and its aftermath.