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Christina A León

Assistant Professor of Literature
Literature
104 Friedl, 1316 Campus Drive, Durham, NC 27708
104 Friedl, Durham, NC 27708

Overview


Christina A. León is Assistant Professor of Literature at Duke University. She specializes in literary, anticolonial, critical race, feminist, and queer theories, with a concentration on Latinx and Caribbean literature, art, and thought. Her scholarly writing focuses on the interplay of materiality and semiosis to better theorize and attend to works by authors and artists who often become known only through their identificatory markers, overdetermined by grammars of race and gender. She is the author of Matters of Inscription: Reading Figures of Latinidad (NYU Press 2024). Her articles and essays have been published in Women and PerformanceASAP/JournalDiacriticsGLQSargassoSmall AxeRepresentations, and Post-45. She serves as the co-editor of the Gender Theory book series at SUNY Press.  

Current Appointments & Affiliations


Assistant Professor of Literature · 2023 - Present Literature, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences
Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, & Feminist, Studies · 2024 - Present Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences

In the News


Published March 8, 2024
The Latinidad Women Scholars at Duke

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Recent Publications


Matters of Inscription Reading Figures of Latinidad

Book · August 13, 2024 "Matters of Inscription: Reading Figures of Latinidad argues that Latinx inscriptions require us to read at the edge of materiality and semiosis, charting a nimble method for "reading" various forms of Latinx marks and even the word Latinx . ... Cite

Knots in the Throat

Journal Article Representations · May 1, 2023 This essay concentrates on the figural knots that both refuse and suture readings across Raquel Salas Rivera’s Preguntas frecuentes and X/Ex/Exis. Tracing self-translations, the essay reads how Salas Rivera steals back from English and binary gende ... Full text Open Access Cite

Exorbitant Dust

Journal Article GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies · June 1, 2021 AbstractThis article traces the figure of polvo (dust) across the writing career of Puerto Rican and New York writer Manuel Ramos Otero. Polvo heralds the macabre sensuality of his early short stories, long before his diagn ... Full text Open Access Cite
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Education, Training & Certifications


Emory University · 2014 Ph.D.