Alan-Michael Weatherford (He/Him/His)

Alan-Michael Weatherford (preferably AM) is a PhD candidate in the Comparative Literature, Cinema and Media Department at the University of Washington-Seattle. He teaches an array of courses in a variety of departments, institutions, and spaces. At UW, he ranges from teaching introductory and intermediate level French and Spanish language to writing courses focused on Queer Studies, seminars on Colonial Carceral Logics in the Americas, and praxis-based courses on Prison Abolition. He also volunteers, teaches in, and organizes at the local Monroe Correctional Complex.

While he has a wide range of research interests from Caribbean Cultural Studies to Postcolonial Studies, the Hemispheric Americas, French (Post)Modern Philosophy, and Queer of Color Critique, his current project, however, is firmly situated in the analysis of cultural production—both literary and visual archives—involving sex workers within the sex tourism industry of the Greater Antilles at the dawn of the neoliberal moment. His formation as a scholar allows him to examine colonialisms in a comparative approach across historical and linguistic areas with rigorous interdisciplinary research methods. In focusing on the figure of the sex worker, he helps render intelligible the deeply complex transnational structures and processes of social differentiation articulated together by race, gender, sex/uality, class, nation, and empire in the late 20th into the 21st centuries.