Faculty Spotlight: Christine Varnado
In 2011, Professor Christine Varnado came to UB as a visiting assistant professor. This past year, after a decade of love and labor here, she received tenure. Over the course of the last twelve months, not only did Professor Varnado reach this exciting professional milestone, but she also published The Shapes of Fancy: Reading for Queer Desire in Early Modern Literature with the University of Minnesota Press. It was a pleasure to revisit these exciting achievements with her.
With The Shapes of Fancy, Varnado aims to reshape where we locate queerness in premodern texts. "The Shapes of Fancy is about how we read for erotic desire, or, really, any kind of erotic energy in literary texts. [...] With my book, I wanted to expand what we can use from queer history when we read literature. Rather than looking at queerness in early modern literature as a quality of individuals or a quality of pair relationships, I wanted to look at queerness as a quality of scenes, queerness as something that could appear in affective structures and group relational dynamics," Varnado said.
The relationships she's formed in GGSS throughout her time at UB with faculty mentors and students alike have informed Varnado's scholarship and writing. "We are so lucky to get to work in this department. I have benefitted enormously from having such ethical mentors in the GGSS department. [...]. In terms of the content of my book, my teaching in queer theory definitely enlivened the intervention I was trying to make in how we read early modern texts. My students, particularly the amazing graduate students I taught here while I was still working on the book [...] were amazing to read with," she shared.
While it was strange being unable to attend the usual literary studies conferences or to share news of her book's publication with her colleagues in person due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Varnado reassured us that she found safe ways to celebrate its release. "I did have these wonderful book talks in the department, which happened on Zoom last year. That was inestimably important in this really scary, depressing moment, to have opportunities to celebrate and share my new work. I had a talk through the department, a talk through UB's Humanities Institute Queer Studies Research Workshop, and a talk at Columbia with Jack Halberstam as the respondent."
According to Varnado, the tenure process highlighted all the work that goes on behind the scenes to make the GGSS department the amazing intellectual space that it is. "It's staggering the amount of work that goes into processes like tenure and promotion behind the scenes, and all the work that goes into having a department has really driven this home for me, too: it's a collective endeavor, and nobody flourishes without an enormous collective outlay of labor. It makes me feel very convicted and obligated to do that in turn for my colleagues and my students," she said.
If Varnado's words on reconceptualizing queerness in early modern texts sparked your curiosity, you can read The Shapes of Fancy: Reading for Queer Desire in Early Modern Literature through the University of Minnesota Press's open-access platform as well as in a hard-copy.
As for what's next, Varnado has been awarded a Humanities Institute Faculty Fellowship this year that will allow her to focus on writing her second book: Queering Birth, Queering Death.