Rate My Professor Kyla Wazana Tompkins

Kyla Wazana Tompkins is Professor and Department Chair in the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Buffalo, a position she assumed in 2023. Previously, she served as Professor of English and Gender and Women’s Studies at Pomona College from 2022 (on leave since 2023), Associate Professor from 2011, and held multiple terms as Chair of the Program in Gender and Women’s Studies between 2008 and 2021. Earlier roles at Pomona included Assistant Professor from 2004 to 2011. Tompkins earned her Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University in 2004, M.A. in English from the University of Toronto in 1998, and B.A., magna cum laude, in Specialized Honours English from York University in 1996. A first-generation college student originally from Toronto, she has lived in major cities including San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York.

Her research examines aesthetic production, biopolitics, and the history of ideas through interdisciplinary methods grounded in close reading and archival practices, drawing on queer, feminist, Marxist, Black diasporic, and postcolonial theories. Key interests include queer theory, biopower, gender and sexuality studies, feminist theory, food studies, nineteenth-century United States literature, history of race, pedagogy, taste and aesthetics, and the history of the senses, with a focus on how histories of diet, nutrition, science, food, eating, art, and sexuality shape racial difference. Major publications are Deviant Matter: Ferment, Intoxicants, Jelly, Rot (NYU Press, 2024), winner of the 2024/2025 Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize from the Modern Language Association and American Studies Association and honorable mention for the Rene Wellek Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association; Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century (NYU Press, 2012), recipient of the Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize from the American Studies Association and the Best Book Award from the Association for the Study of Food and Society; and Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies (NYU Press, 2021), as managing editor, which received the Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title. Her essay “On Boba” in the Los Angeles Review of Books won the James Beard Award for Best Essay in 2023. Tompkins has received the American Council of Learned Societies Burkhardt Fellowship for Recently Tenured Faculty (2017–2018), Wig Distinguished Teaching Award from Pomona College (2016), and multiple Queer Faculty Teacher and Mentor of the Year awards from the Claremont Colleges (2015, 2012, 2005). She co-executive produces the Feminist Keywords Podcast and has convened academic colloquia and working sessions.