About

Brady James Forrest is a cultural theorist, teacher, and writer originally from Southern California who currently resides just outside of Washington D.C. He received his B.A. in Global Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara (2013). They received their M.A.s in American Studies (2016) and English (2021) from the George Washington University where they are currently an Ph.D. Candidate completing a dissertation entitled “A Sensuous Melancholia.” The project focuses on minoritarian performance across a range of genre and form to locate melancholia as a structure of feeling ready to emerge. Broadly, their work is primarily focused on twentieth and twenty-first century American literature and culture with research and teaching interests in Crip/Queer theory, Black Study, performance studies, and visual culture.

Brady is currently adjunct faculty in both the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Georgetown University and the Department of Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies at American University.  They have designed and taught a wide range of courses spanning critical theories, American literature and visual culture, and methodological approaches.

Brady has presented work at the American Studies Association Annual Meeting including panels sponsored by the Critical Disability Studies Caucus, the Mezipatra Queer Film Festival, the Museum of Popular Culture Conference, the DC Queer Studies Symposium, the Northeast MLA Annual Convention, and the Critical Ethnic Studies Association Conference. In 2017, they were selected to present his paper titled “Crip Feelings/Feeling Crip” in the Disability and Emotion Seminar Series hosted by the Center for Culture and Disability Studies at Liverpool Hope University. A revised version of the presentation is now available in a special issue of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies.  They are currently working on a manuscript on testosterone, visual culture, and the trans gaze. With Rachael Nebraska Lynch, they are currently working on a project titled Crip Marxism. Their other works in progress include two article manuscripts titled “In Our Time and Place: Queer Haptics in Hemingway’s ‘Three Day Blow’” and “Finding Mad Black Elsewhere in A Visitation of Spirits.”

In the 2014-2015 academic year Brady was chosen as one of three University Archives Diversity Research Fellows at the George Washington University. The fellowship culminated in a public presentation that charted how the LGBTQ community at GW represented itself visually through art, flyers, and advertising from 1971 to the present and the shift over that time from inclusion based on an increasing number of identity categories towards a collective feeling of pride. In 2015 and 2018 they received Summer Research Grants from the Departments of American Studies and English, respectively, and in 2019 they received a Summer Pre-Dissertation Fellowship from the George Washington University. Their work has been supported at the George Washington University by a University Fellowship and Department of English Graduate Assistantship.