Dr. Sidney Lyon
Hi WEST!
I am very excited to be joining UCCS and the WEST department as a Visiting Assistant Professor this year. I moved to Colorado Springs from Marshall, Michigan, where I was teaching Contemporary American literature at a small, liberal arts college. Michigan is my home state; however, I was born in Florida and spent a large part of my childhood down in the Gulf.
In 2020, I graduated with my PhD in English from Miami University. Completing a dissertation during a normal academic year is difficult enough, let alone during a global pandemic! My time teaching during the early pandemic had a profound effect on my anti-racist teaching strategies. By the end of the 2021 academic year, I had incorporated a trauma-informed style of teaching into my classroom, which I continue to this day. I hope to share my style of teaching with many of you this year because while life is slowly returning to normal, we cannot deny that the trauma of witnessing and experiencing mass death has changed us and our culture.
Speaking of death, my research on 20th and 21st century Ethnic American literature and culture is heavily focused on examining representations of death and dying through a lens of necropolitics (and biopolitics), posthumanism, and transpacific studies. I specialize on Asian American cultural production but am invested in reading across racial lines and other categories of identity to locate and critique related methods of death-making, oppression, and control.
In the spring, I will be teaching Introduction to Social justice Studies and two new courses. “Robots, Futures & Asian America” is a 2000 level course that will examine the association of Asian Americans with technological futures and technological dystopia. We will read and watch a range of texts and artifacts from popular culture including sci-fi films like Blade Runner and The Matrix, video games such as “Cyberpunk 2077,” and fiction from Jack London, Cathy Park Hong, and Larissa Lai to name a few. If discussing intellectual super villains, imperializing aliens, and emotionless robots is not for you, think about my other course, “The Politics of Death and Dying.” This class will explore the political, social, and economic implications of death and dying, focusing on the inequities and inequalities surrounding death and death management in the US. We will think about topics and concepts like social death, slow death, politicized death, and dystopian-esque life-extending technologies developed by large corporations like Google.
I look forward to meeting and getting to know many of you this year. Hopefully you will join me in one of my spring classes!
Dr. Sidne Lyon, Visiting Assistant Professor