Lette Bragg
I received my Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from Cornell University in 2018, with a graduate minor concentration in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. I am currently Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Swarthmore College. Before Swarthmore, I taught at the University of Delaware and Cornell University, offering courses in writing and literature, with an emphasis on postcolonial literature and feminist and gender studies.
I grew up in South Africa, Namibia, and Bahrain, and I studied in China and Scotland before immigrating to the United States. I currently live in Wilmington, DE.
My research concerns the conditions of knowledge production and what survives beyond them. My first book, The Ruins of Solitude: Maternity at the Limits of Academic Discourse (forthcoming at punctum books), draws on my background in critical theory and feminist philosophy to foreground relational modes of knowledge production that test the limit of academic discourse. Closely describing my embodied relation both with high theory and my infant daughter, I illuminate the limitations of a knowledge conditioned on what I call “solitude.”
My current book-length project builds on the argument of Ruins, developing concepts that reframe the time and space of such events as thinking, building, and resistance. Other work, which also considers subjectivity, writing, and methodology, has been published in The Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, Cultural Studies Review, and Feminist Theory.
My podcast, “Many Academies,” interviews writers, thinkers, and scholars whose creative and transformative practices of writing and publication push back against the conventions of knowledge production, helping us dislodge the idea that there is one Academy to which we must work to belong.
