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The Founding College of the University of Toronto
Headshot of Dana Seitler

Dana Seitler

Faculty
Director, Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies; Professor, Department of English
416-978-8103
University College (UC) 249
15 King's College Circle, Toronto, ON M5S 3H7
Campus: St. George

Dana Seitler is Professor of English and Director of the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Atavistic Tendencies: The Culture of Science in American Modernity (University of Minnesota Press, 2008) and Reading Sideways: The Queer Politics of Art in Modern American Fiction (Fordham University Press, 2019), which was a 2020 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Best Book in LGBTQ Studies. She has published in several academic journals including American Quarterly, GLQ, Criticism, Cultural Critique, American Literature, Genre, and A/SAP. Her current project, Narcopoetics: Withdrawal, Biopolitics, Ecstasy focuses on the politics and aesthetics of the opioid crisis at the intersections of race and sexuality in the U.S.

  • MA, University of Chicago
  • PhD, University of Chicago
  • American Literature
  • Queer theory and sexuality studies
  • Feminist theory
  • Cultural studies of science
  • Visual culture
  • Aesthetics

Books

  • Reading Sideways: The Queer politics of Art in Modern American Culture (Fordham University Press, 2019)
  • Atavistic Tendencies: The Culture of Science in American Modernity (University of Minnesota Press, Fall 2008).

Selected Articles

  • "I'm Dying to!: Biopolitics, Suicide Plots, and the Ecstasy of Withdrawal," in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science (Palgrave 2020).
  • "Suicidal Tendencies: Notes Toward a Queer Narratology," GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (Fall 2019).
  • “Willing to Die: Addiction, Desire, and other Ambivalences of Living,” Cultural Critique Vol. 98 (Winter 2018).
  • “Strange Beauty: The Politics of Ungenre in Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills,” American Literature, 86: 3 (September 2014).
  • “Making Sexuality Sensible: Tammy Rae Carland and Catherine Opie’s Queer Aesthetic Forms” in Feeling Photography, ed. Thy Phu and Elspeth Brown (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014).
  • “Unnatural Selection: Mothers, Eugenic Feminism, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Regeneration Narratives,” American Quarterly (March 2003). 
Reprinted in Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Patricia Lengermann and Gillian Niebrugge-Brantley, eds. (Ashgate, 2013).
  • “Freud’s Menagerie,” Genre: Forms of Discourse & Culture (Spring/Summer 2005). 
  • “Queer Physiognomies, or How Many Ways can we do the History of Sexuality?” Criticism (Winter 2004).
  • The Crux, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Editor with an introduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).