Dana Seitler

Dana Seitler is Professor of English and the director of the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. She teaches and conducts research in the areas of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literatures and cultures, queer theory and sexuality studies, feminist theory, cultural studies of science, visual culture, and aesthetics.

Office Hours

Thursdays 3:30pm-4:40pm or by appointment.

Publications

Books

Reading Sideways: The Queer politics of Art in Modern American Culture (Fordham University Press, 2019)

Atavistic Tendencies: The Culture of Science in American Modernity (University of Minnesota Press, Fall 2008).

Selected Articles

"I'm Dying to!: Biopolitics, Suicide Plots, and the Ecstasy of Withdrawal," in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science (Palgrave 2020).

"Suicidal Tendencies: Notes Toward a Queer Narratology," GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (Fall 2019).

“Willing to Die: Addiction, Desire, and other Ambivalences of Living,” Cultural Critique Vol. 98 (Winter 2018).

“Strange Beauty: The Politics of Ungenre in Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills,” American Literature, 86: 3 (September 2014).

“Making Sexuality Sensible: Tammy Rae Carland and Catherine Opie’s Queer Aesthetic Forms” in Feeling Photography, ed. Thy Phu and Elspeth Brown (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014).

“Unnatural Selection: Mothers, Eugenic Feminism, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Regeneration Narratives,” American Quarterly (March 2003). 
Reprinted in Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Patricia Lengermann and Gillian Niebrugge-Brantley, eds. (Ashgate, 2013).

“Freud’s Menagerie,” Genre: Forms of Discourse & Culture (Spring/Summer 2005). 

“Queer Physiognomies, or How Many Ways can we do the History of Sexuality?” Criticism (Winter 2004).

The Crux, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Editor with an introduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).

Current Research

Broken Life: Withdrawal, Ecstasy, Biopolitics.