Bernabe S Mendoza

I work at the intersections of critical race theory, Black feminisms, and science fiction studies. My current book project critically examines the works of Octavia Butler that intervene in dominant European and US perceptions of the human. I am interested in how Butler's science fiction depicts oppositional binaries such as white/black, male/female, free/unfree, and civilized/savage as a direct confrontation between the human and the nonhuman. I also medidate on Butler's evolutionary speculation on what is truly at stake in thinking, along with Frantz Fanon, of a "new species of the human" that is not defined by hierarchical binaries. My work has been supported by The Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University, and my writing has been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Journal of Science Fiction and Philosophy, and philoSOPHIA: A Journal of transContinental Feminism. I also have extensive teaching experience and enjoy mentoring and working with undergraduates.