Gina Filo

Biography

Dr. Filo's work explores the intersections of gender, sexuality, and race in early modern England. Fundamentally, she is interested in how early moderns negotiated embodied difference. Her first book, Shattering the Self in Early Modern English Verse: Gender, Sex, and Queerness Beyond the Human (Northwestern U. Press), shows how early modern poets embraced the self-annihilating possibliities of sex in order to imagine new, flexible, and queer forms of pleasure, selfhood, gender, and human status. Her current book project, "Race, Gender, and Desire in Early Modern Poetry," examines poetry of interracial desire from the seventeenth century; this book will show how early modern English poets conversely found interracial eroticism not a site of pleasure, but rather of anxiety and even repulsion. In addition to these book projects, her work can be found in venues like Studies in Philology, Modern Philology, and ELH, among others.

At Utah State, Dr. Filo teaches courses like Shakespeare, early modern British literature, and introduction to literary analysis. Having directed the Gender and Sexuality Studies minor at her former institution, she is particularly interested in working with students on any aspect of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature or gender and sexuality in literature. She loves talking with students about books of all kinds, though, so whether you want to discuss Shakespeare or The Hunger Games, she'd be delighted to hear from you.