Overview
Amaris has a Ph.D. in the department of Africana Studies with a concentration in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her research and teaching foci include 20th and 21st century African diasporic literature and visual culture, gender and sexuality studies, and critical disability studies. Her dissertation, “Desirous Disposability: Circuits of Race, Sex, and Refusal” examines forms of ritual violence and disposal that mark black life in modernity. Grounded in black feminist diagrammatic drawing, critical disability studies, psychoanalysis, and studies in affect and aesthetics, “Desirous Disposability” reads the ruptures created by African diasporic literature and art to colonial, imperial, neoliberal circuits of desire that dominate ideologies of black subject formation in the aftermath of slavery.
Amaris has been awarded fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Institute for Comparative Modernities, and the Mellon Collaborative Studies in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities. In 2019 she participated in the Whitney Independent Study as a Critical Writing Fellow. Amaris is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Tufts University.