Tao Leigh Goffe

Assistant Professor

310 Triphammer Road
tlg92@cornell.edu

Departments and programs

Africana Studies and Research Center
American Studies Program
Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program
Literatures in English
Milstein Program in Technology & Humanity

Summary

Tao Leigh Goffe is an assistant professor of literary theory and cultural history. She has a joint appointment between the Department of Africana Studies and Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University. She is also a writer and a DJ specializing in the narratives that emerge from histories of imperialism, migration, and globalization.

She received her Bachelor's degree in English from Princeton University in 2009 and PhD in American Studies from Yale University in 2015. She has held research positions at Princeton University, New York University, and Leiden University in the Netherlands.

At the intersections of the environmental humanities and science and technology studies, her interdisciplinary research and practice examines the unfolding relationship between technology, the senses, memory, and nature. DJ’ing is an important part of her pedagogy and research. Film production, sound editing, digital cartography, and oral history are also integral to her praxis. Her writing has been published in Small Axe, Amerasia Journal, and Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas.

She is at work on a book on the ecological poetics and entanglements of the Caribbean plantation. Her second project is a manifesto on digital technology, black feminist praxis and DJ culture called Pon De Replay.

Research Focus

Environmental Humanities
Science and Technology Studies
Poetics and Philosophies of the Caribbean
Media Studies
Sound Technologies and Infrastructures
Intellectual Genealogies
Afro-Asia
Afropean Studies
Gender and Sexuality Studies

Publications

Peer Reviewed Publications

"‘Guano in their destiny’: Race, Geology, and a Philosophy of Indenture," Amerasia Journal, June 2019.

“Sugarwork: The Gastropoetics of Afro-Asia After the Plantation,” Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, April, 2019.

"Albums of Inclusion: The Photographic Poetics of Caribbean Chinese Visual Kinship," Small Axe, 56, July 2018.

Reviews and Curatorial Writing

Exhibition Review of “Relational Undercurrents, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, April 2019.

“Entangled Genealogies of Women’s Work,” essay on the artwork of Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, as part of the exhibition catalogue for Women’s Work, Pen and Brush, April 2019.

Sea of Poppies and the Curry of Diaspora: Recipe for Stuffed Aubergine Curry, MLA Cookbook (with Daksha Chouhan), January 2019.

“Dress-Up Play,” essay on the Photography of Ming Smith, as part of the exhibition Race, Art, Myth, and Justice, CCADI, November 2018- June 2019.

Caribbean Debt Syllabus, “Intimate Bonds and Bonded Labor: Indenture and Debt Peonage in the Caribbean,” #NoMoreDebt, Contributor, Unit 4, October 2018.

Review of Wildlife of the Caribbean, Caribbean Quarterly, March 2018.