The Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender welcomes C. Riley Snorton as Professor of English and Gender Studies in both ISSG and the Department of English and Comparative Literature.
C. Riley Snorton is a cultural theorist who focuses on racial, sexual and transgender histories and cultural productions. He is the author of Nobody Is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) and Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), winner of the John Boswell Prize from the American Historical Association, the William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the Modern Language Association, the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction, the Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, and an honorable mention from the American Library Association Stonewall Book Award Committee. Snorton is a co-editor of Saturation: Race, Art and the Circulation of Value (MIT Press/New Museum, 2020) and The Flesh of the Matter: A Hortense Spillers Reader (Vanderbilt University Press, 2024).
Since 2020, he has been a co-editor of GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies (Duke University Press). Snorton’s next monograph, tentatively titled Mud: Ecologies of Racial Meaning examines the constitutive presence of swamps to racial practices and formations in the Americas. Currently, he is co-authoring A Black Queer History of the United States (Beacon Press), set for release January 20, 2026.
