Alex Brostoff is Assistant Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at Georgetown University, where they are Affiliated Faculty in the Global and Comparative Literature Program and the Center for Latin American Studies. An interdisciplinary scholar and translator, they study how trans and queer cultural production negotiates and recasts the relationship between self-figuration and decolonial critique. Their first book, The Autotheory Effect, reframes autotheory's place in the political history of trans and queer literature of the Américas (Columbia University Press, forthcoming 2027). Comparing divergent genealogies that reflect the past half century of poststructuralist thought as it interfaces with travesti-trans epistemologies, queer of color feminisms, and decolonial critique, The Autotheory Effect stages critical encounters between the materiality of embodiment and the mediation of language.
They are co-editor of two volumes and two special journal issues. Autotheories (The MIT Press, 2025), co-edited with Vilashini Cooppan, appeared on The Millions “Most Anticipated” list for Winter 2025 and received a CHOICE Selection for Noteworthy Titles; it is the first book-length collection to convene scholars and practitioners of the form from across the humanities, social sciences, and creative writing. Building on this methodology, Reassignments: Trans and Sex from the Clinical to the Critical (Fordham University Press, forthcoming 2027), co-edited with rl Goldberg, repurposes the term “reassignment” as a method for contesting how sexology, law, imperialism, and psychoanalysis have shaped what constitutes trans narrative today. With Goldberg, Brostoff also guest edited “Trans Literatures ,” a special issue of College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies (2025) and with Lauren Fournier, they guest edited “Autotheory ,” a special issue of ASAP/Journal (2021). Brostoff has translated a range of literary nonfiction and critical theory from Spanish and Portuguese, including Indigenous leader Ailton Krenak's Ancestral Future (Polity Press, 2024) and the late Brazilian activist Nêgo Bispo's The Earth Gives, the Earth Wants (Polity Press, 2026) in collaboration with Jamille Pinheiro Dias. Their scholarship and translations have appeared in Diacritics, Representations, TSQ, Critical Times, Dibur, Synthesis, and Asymptote, as well as at the Museum of Modern Art and elsewhere. They serve as an associate editor of College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies.
Before joining the faculty at Georgetown, Brostoff was Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, and a visiting fellow at the University of Sydney’s Hunt-Simes Institute in Sexuality Studies. Their work has been supported by the Provost’s Faculty Research Grant at Kenyon College, the Professor Norman Jacobson Memorial Fellowship and Teaching Award at UC Berkeley, and the Andrew W. Mellon-funded Cal Performances Grant, among others. They were honored to receive Berkeley's Lili Fabilli and Eric Hoffer Essay Prize (2021) and Kenyon’s LGBTQ+ Faculty/Staff Advocate Award (2023). Nominated for the Pushcart Prize, their creative writing and cultural criticism have appeared in The Cleveland Review of Books, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Midway Journal, Exposition Review, Hyperallergic, and elsewhere.
In Fall 2026, Brostoff will be a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies and the University of Lisbon's Centre for English Studies.
Academic Appointment(s)
- Primary
- Assistant Professor, College - Department of English
- Secondary
- Assistant Professor, College - Women's and Gender Studies