Department of English

Thomas Conners is assistant professor of English at the University of Florida. He is a scholar of US Latinx, Caribbean, and Latin American literatures, as well as critical race, queer, and legal studies. Broadly speaking, his research considers how race, gender, and sexuality appear across different social and cultural forms, like law and literature.

His first book project, Colorblind Aesthetics in Latinx Literature and Law (under contract with NYU Press’s Sexual Cultures series) explores the longstanding legal practice and, more recently, literary tactic where explicit mentions of race are replaced with conversations about gender and sexuality, and where the signs of race are installed in objects and landscapes. On the whole, Colorblind Aesthetics challenges legal history to recognize colorblindness as a constitutive component to US liberalism and asks Latinx studies to take literary form, as opposed to articulated identity, as the starting point for the critique of racial hierarchy in the US.

From this project’s reconsideration of how to read for race in Latinx literature has emerged Tommy’s second project focused on the interpretative methods of Latinx Studies, titled Latinx Methods and the Politics of Praxis. This co-edited, interdisciplinary volume argues for the importance and impact of not just who and what Latinidad is, but how Latinidad is, exploring how Latinx and Latinidad are created and deconstructed through the scholarly actions of asking, interpreting, and critiquing.

Tommy’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in MELUS, Diálogo, ReVista, and Latinx Literature and Critical Futurities: 1992-2020 and has been supported by Harvard’s Open Gate Foundation and the Sue-Je Lee Gage Residency for Human Rights & Social Justice. He earned his Ph.D. and M.A. in Hispanic & Portuguese Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and he holds a B.A. in Spanish from Ithaca College. Before joining UF, Tommy held appointments at Allegheny College and Harvard University, where he was recognized with the Jan Thaddeus Teaching Prize and voted a favorite professor by the Class of 2023.