Asimina Ino Nikolopoulou

Asimina Ino Nikolopoulou is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender, Women's and Sexuality Studies (GWSS) and English. Her first book project Sensate Matter: Feminist Epistemologies of the Black Diaspora and the Global South brings together critical race theory and affect theory to trace an epistemological shift in the work of contemporary writers and visual artists of color whose affective storytelling contests the hegemonic stratification of historical archives, and in turn procures emancipatory counter archives of past and present dispossessions under global capitalism. Employing a transnational and hemispheric approach her work exposes cognition and sentimental sympathy as culprits behind asymmetries of citizenship and belonging which continue to reverberate in the contemporary moment, and uncovers how harnessing the senses and intimacies often obscured in the archive unsettles the view of the enlightenment subject as sovereign, male, liberal, white and autonomous. She is also working on a second book project tentatively titled A New Sensory Hermeneutics: Graphic Refuge and Narrative Form, which looks into the conjuring of fugitivity in affective economies across texts, objects, migratory routes, and digital interfaces. At Grinnell, she teaches Feminism and Popular Culture, Critical Race Feminisms, as well as Women, Fugitivity and Racial Capitalism.