Photo Credit | Brian Livingstone
Cole Rizki, Ph.D. is assistant professor of American Studies and affiliate faculty with the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and the Department of Spanish, Italian & Portuguese at the University of Virginia. In 2024-2025, Rizki will be on leave with the support of an ACLS Fellowship. Rizki is a Latin Americanist and transgender studies scholar whose research examines the entanglements of transgender cultural production and activisms with histories of state violence and terror throughout the Américas. As a scholar of contemporary Latin American gender and sexuality studies, visual culture, and performance studies, his work makes central interventions across these disciplines. Primarily, he analyzes the work of contemporary politics and aesthetics by examining how political demands take shape and become legible through visual, embodied, and archival representations and practices. Rizki’s monograph in process tentatively titled “Travesti Tide: Trans Politics Beyond Liberalism” offers a new historical and cultural interpretation of trans politics as a response to illiberal state violence and its forms. In doing so, the monograph provincializes US-centric histories of state violence, the liberal democratic state form, and identity politics that continue to underwrite the field of transgender studies. At the same time, “Travesti Tide” revises the study of fascism, authoritarianism, and populism by highlighting how sex and gender are central to these forms of governance and power.
Rizki’s editorial work in trans studies is also widely recognized. He is invited guest editor of “Cuerpos furiosos: Travesti-Trans Politics in Revolt” a special issue of NACLA: Report on the Americas on travesti, trans, and queer activisms and resistance practices across the hemisphere (vol. 57, no. 1, March 2025). He is also co-editor of “Trans Studies en las Américas,” a special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly on Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Trans Studies (May 2019). Since 2020, Rizki serves as TSQ’s Translation Section Editor. He is an active member of multiple national and international professional associations, and he currently serves as chair of the Modern Language Association’s 20th and 21st Century Latin American Forum Executive Committee.
Rizki’s scholarly work has received multiple awards and recognitions. Most recently, for his monograph in progress “Travesti Tide: Trans Politics Beyond Liberalism,” Rizki was awarded the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowship for the monograph’s contributions to transgender studies, Latin American cultural studies, and histories of gender and state violence. In 2024, his article “Gore Aesthetics: Chilean Necroliberalism and Travesti Resistance” (JLACS) received the “Crompton-Noll Prize” for Best LGBTQ Studies Article from the MLA’s GL/Q Caucus and the American Studies Association’s Q/T Caucus, the “Sylvia Molloy Prize” for Best Article in the Humanities from the Latin American Studies Association (Sexualities Section), and “Best Article in Latin American Visual Cultures Studies” from LASA’s Visual Cultures Section. His article “Familiar Grammars of Loss and Belonging: Curating Trans Kinship in Post-Dictatorship Argentina” (JVC) was also short-listed for the International Association for Visual Culture and the Journal of Visual Culture Early Career Researcher Essay Prize and received honorable mention for Best Article from the Visual Cultures Studies Section of the Latin American Studies Association. His work in Latin American trans studies, trans visual culture, and trans history has similarly been recognized as essential reading in trans studies and included as part of two trans studies syllabi published by Art Journal and Radical History Review’s digital venue “Abusable Past.” In 2024, Rizki received the “All-University Teaching Award” at the University of Virginia in recognition of his outstanding undergraduate and graduate-level teaching and mentorship.
His writing appears or is forthcoming in TSQ , Feminist Theory, Radical History Review, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Balam, College Literature, and the Journal of Visual Culture among others with book reviews in GLQ and Women & Performance. Rizki’s research has received support from the American Council for Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, the Fulbright Program, and the National Humanities Center.
Rizki holds a Ph.D. in Literature with Certificates in Feminist Studies as well as College Teaching from Duke University; an M.A. in Spanish with a Certificate in Visual Culture Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison; and a B.A. in Spanish with Highest Honors from Smith College.
Professional Affiliations
Latin American Studies Association
National Women’s Studies Association
American Studies Association
Modern Language Association
International Association for Visual Culture
Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics (NYU)
The Latin American Interdisciplinary Gender Network (Yale University-UNAM)