Felicia Nadel

Felicia is currently a Teaching Assistant at Stony Brook working on her dissertation for the English PhD program. With a focus on ecofeminism, imperialism and Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies, Felicia writes with purpose. 

What are your specializations and topics of interest as well as what you’re currently working on? 

I’m in my second year of the English PhD, so I’m ending the coursework period this semester and starting to gather people I’ll be working with on my dissertation committee. I’m really interested in a lot of queer spaces and queer world building theory that came out of the community grappling with AIDS in the 80s and 90s. I’m interested in using it to think about psychologically processing the climate crisis that we’re in. I recently wrote the “Thread Moving Through the Hole” essay, [it’s about] me processing loss of snow, processes of immigration, and how we contextualize what’s happening around us. It’s definitely in its very early stages — over the summer is where I’m reading and researching and in a focused way. A lot of ecofeminist theories that are rooted in race relations and imperialism — you can’t disconnect them.

What led you to go for doctoral studies?

Going back to [the question of] how can you be effective, what kind of person are you? I’m almost 30, so I have done different things since college. I was mostly working at queer bars or on women or indigenous-led farms and switching between those two roles after college, but always working on writing. I still think those forms of work aren’t things that I’m leaving behind. I definitely see a future still working on farms in the summer. Now I work at a literary café […] very engaged in New York queer scenes and activist scenes. Reading, writing, and teaching about the issues that matter to me has always been something that I know I am nourished by. I also really like being with students and forming relationships that will help them […] move in the world in a way that is kinder to it.

Speaking of students, versus your time as a student and now being a Teaching Assistant interacting with humanities students, what have you noticed students today facing? Are there any notable differences, or do you kind of feel like it’s more or less the same experience? 

It’s definitely not the same experience, which is crazy because I’m only 10 years older than everyone in college. Students appear to be more anxious and feel very scared about messing up, [they] don’t seem to have a lot of confidence or training in their ability to write. They’re fully capable of it, […] I do think that it is a newer trend of a heightened sense of perfectionism. I’m friends with teachers who have been teaching for 30 years who do effort-based grading, and I think that would produce a different type of student in a good way.

What drew you to Stony Brook? I know you’ve been in a lot of different locations, is there anything about this school that stood out to you in terms of PhD programs?

There are things about this program that are really great. The English and the Gender Studies programs are really interconnected here. Also, when I was applying to PhD programs, it was important for me to write in ways that are academic, but are not really what the academy wants you to do. I really love theory or academic writing that is narrative [like] poetry or theory work that’s image-based. I specifically wanted to keep going through [the PhD program] one, because I want to teach at universities, but two, I want to learn to write that way and that writing training. So far I’ve been able to already start working on that writing, and for all of my coursework, instead of a classic final, I’ve gotten to experiment with different types of that kind of writing [surrounding] my dissertation project. I do already feel like I’ve been getting training in trying to write that way, so that’s been cool.

Lastly, what are you reading at the moment? 

Right now I am reading a transnational feminism of the Americas book. One of my favorite theory books is No Archive Will Restore You by Julietta Singh. Getting to return to Toni Morrison in our class [Single Author] is really nice. One of my classes is a teaching practicum figuring out how to teach with feminist pedagogy, so lots of different things.