Victoria Papa is a writer, scholar, educator, and curator working across modern and contemporary literature and visual culture. Her research explores how writers and artists imagine embodiment, illness, and care beyond the limits of rationalist and ableist frameworks, with particular attention to experimental and esoteric aesthetic practices. Animated by feminist, queer, decolonial, and posthumanist methods, she is especially interested in how art and literature reorient perception to conjure otherwise worlds. She is Associate Professor of English and Visual Culture at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.

Her current book project, Subtle Bodies: Illness and Esoteric Aesthetics, traces how modern and contemporary writers and visual artists draw from occluded knowledges and esoteric practices to shapeshift experiences of bodily, psychic, and social illness. Victoria’s writing has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Women & Performance, Modernism/modernity, ASAP/J, Public Books, and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, among other publications. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Yale University’s Beinecke Library, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. 

Her recent curatorial projects include Ecologies of the In\between, a group exhibition at Gallery 51 (2025). In 2020, she co-created CARESYLLABUS.org, a public humanities and arts project focused on care, justice, and creative practice, in collaboration with MASS MoCA. 

Victoria received her PhD in English from Northeastern University and a Graduate Certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the Graduate Consortium in Women’s Studies at MIT. Her work is shaped by lived experiences of chronic illness and caregiving, and by sustained engagements with integrative wellness, herbalism, and esoteric practices such as astrology and tarot. She lives in the Berkshires of Massachusetts on the ancestral homelands of the Muhheaconneok or Mohican people and the Wabanaki peoples.