Victoria Papa is Associate Professor of English and Visual Culture at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. Her research and teaching examine the intersection of embodiment, aesthetics, and counter onto-epistemologies. Animated by feminist, queer, decolonial, and posthumanist methods, her work is especially interested in how writers and artists engage occulted practices and esoteric aesthetics to disrupt dominant narratives of individualism, universalism, rationalism, and ableism. 

Victoria is currently at work on a book project, tentatively titled, Subtle Bodies: Illness and Esoteric Aesthetics. Exploring a range of twentieth- and twenty-first century literary and visual works, Subtle Bodies places disability and care studies, feminist and queer theory, new materialism and posthumanism, and Black studies into conversation with esoteric practices, such as divination, astrology, tarot, mysticism, dreamwork, and syncretic religion. In chapters on H.D., Leonora Carrington, Zora Neale Hurston, Djuna Barnes, Clarice Lispector, Audre Lorde, Deana Lawson, Johanna Hedva, Carolyn Lazard, and CAConrad, Victoria shows how writers and artists make use of esoteric aesthetics to represent embodiment in the throes of bodily, psychic, and social ills. Esoteric aesthetics, she argues, can shapeshift encounters with ableism and refute rigid rubrics of health. Through an imaginative take on the notion of the “subtle body” — a concept that denotes the metaphysical energies that exist alongside the physical body within a number of spiritual traditions — this book demonstrates how esoteric aesthetics conjure otherwise worlds by guiding our perceptions and senses toward the inchoate power of the liminal realm. If structures of domination and supremacy rooted in enlightenment logics of whiteness and colonial patriarchy have long tried to make femme, queer, and of color bodies insignificant, small, and ill, Subtle Bodies underscores how esoteric aesthetics reveal an impulse to recast subtlety as a radical access point to worlds beyond our immediate purview.  

A second book project, Survival Aesthetics: Creative Expression & the Critique of Trauma, troubles dominant models 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 otherwise worlds in-the-making. With attention to modes of embodiment and temporalities of presence, 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, The Brooklyn Rail, 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.