Research
Dr. Thorsteinson focuses on contemporary theories of sexuality, gender, race, and ecology as they arise in 20th-21st century television, film, and fiction. Her current book project Forms of Disposability: Agency, Ontology, Ethics observes how our current ethico-political crises are increasingly determined according to a rubric of “disposability.” Prisons, de facto segregation in public schools, AIDS policy inaction, neoliberal austerity measures, mass labor layoffs, refugee displacements, and the Great Pacific garbage patch— all these disparate problems have been thought to share one thing in common: they evidence our new “Age of Disposability.” But, while there are unique technologies and governing practices that extend its scope and degree today, Dr. Thorsteinson conceives disposability as an aesthetic (and thus ultimately transhistorical) phenomenon. She theorizes disposability as the direct outside or underside to what might be described generally as form and thus traces its power and logic through a kind of formalist negative theology with readings of Margaret Atwood, Harmony Korine, Sarah Schulman, and Nic Pizzolatto, among others.
With a grant from Humanities New York, she is also currently developing an annual online/print open-access and truly “peer” reviewed publication that brings incarcerated researchers, academics, and armchair theorists together on the issues that matter (differently) to us all— tentatively entitled The Social Contact: a journal of collaborative thought. Modifying Rousseau’s notion of the “Social Contract” which presumes that community forms under consent to state authority, “Social Contact” posits that communities form despite and between top-down modes of institutional control. Dialogue between the public and those defined as precisely not-the-public about a variety of issues that matter to us all will ideally prompt readers and contributors to reflect on how we unknowingly construct our imagined communities.
Dr. Thorsteinson has published in the journals Criticism, Diaspora, Modern Fiction Studies, Poetics Today, Transformations, and Writing from Below. She was also principal investigator of the “19th Century Prison Reform Collection” at Cornell University wherein she curated a digital archive of original documents charting the history of the modern prison in New York state.