The Daily Deep Dive with Kyla Schuller

Kyla Schuller is an Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University–New Brunswick, where she investigates the intersections between race, gender, sexuality, and the life sciences in U.S. culture. 

She is the author of The Trouble with White Women: A Counter history of Feminism, an incisive, inspiring history of the struggle between white feminism and the long, vibrant tradition of intersectional feminism that overthrows supremacist politics of all kinds. 

Her academic book The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century was published by Duke University Press in 2018. The Biopolitics of Feeling unearths how scientific ideas about the varying impressibility of the body, or its capacity to be affected over time, led to the modern logics of race difference and the male/female binary. The Nation interviewed her about the book and its implications for politics today.

During the 2017-2018 academic year, she was an external Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. She previously held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the UC Humanities Research Institute and a visiting scholar position at UC Berkeley. 

Her essays appear in or are forthcoming in academic journals such as American Literature, American Quarterly, and GLQ as well as popular outlets including The Rumpus, Los Angeles Review of Books, Avidly, and Post Road. The essays explore topics including: climate grief; our interdependence with microbial life; the cultural history of cosmetic surgery in the Americas; and Native resistance to the use of the evolutionary sciences to legitimate settler colonialism in the nineteenth century. 

She co-edited a special issue of American Quarterly (with Greta LaFleur) on “Origins of Biopolitics in the Americas,” (September 2019), as well as a special issue of Social Text (with Jules Gill-Peterson) on “The Biopolitics of Plasticity” (June 2020). Her research often explores how science and culture function as systems of knowledge that share methods and sources in common, even as they rhetorically claim distinct spheres.