Victoria Papa is Associate Professor of English and Visual Culture at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. Her research and teaching examine the intersection of creative expression and the survival of structural traumas in literature and visual culture in the 20th- and 21st-centuries. Her work is especially interested in how writers and artists both make use of and trouble aesthetic possibilities to enact life-affirming counternarratives of care and kinship.

Victoria is currently at work on her first book tentatively titled, Survival Aesthetics: Creative Expression & the Critique of Trauma. This book project disrupts a dominant 20th-century model of trauma rooted in one-off events, linear time, and the individual subject in favor of attending to the creative spillage that emerges from within trauma’s cracks. Turning a paradigm of trauma on its head, it considers trauma to be constitutive of (rather than aberrant to) a modern worlding project architected by imperialist and supremacist logics. It asks, when trauma is woven into the very structures of modernity, how do artistic acts and objects rupture the traumatic frame? What survives within, through, and beyond the aesthetic? Approaching creative expression as not simply a reparative gesture but rather a process rife with constraint, this project positions “survival aesthetics” as part tactic, part flight— an errant in-between that refigures the fracture of trauma as a portal to other worlds in-the-making. With attention to modes of embodiment and temporalities of presence within 20th- and 21st-century literature and visual art, Survival Aesthetics calls us to attune to the quotidian domain of trauma and the minor registers of survival that heed to it.

Victoria’s writing has appeared in Modernist Cultures, Women & Performance, Modernism/modernity Print+, Public Books, ASAP/J, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature and Literature and History. Her research has been supported by the National Endowment of the Humanities (2023), Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (2022), Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Research Center (2020-2022), Massachusetts Cultural Council (2021), and the NEA-funded Artist Impact Coalition (2021). She received her Ph.D. in English from Northeastern University in 2016.

Victoria is co-creator of CARE SYLLABUS — a public humanities and arts project developed in collaboration with MASS MoCA. She lives in the Berkshires of Massachusetts on the ancestral homelands of the Muhheaconneok or Mohican people and the Wabanaki peoples.