Photo Credit: Elena Siebert
Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe is an associate professor of literary theory and cultural history with a focus on the environmental humanities and geology. She joins the Department of Africana, Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York after over a decade of research and teaching on Black feminist engagements with Indigeneity and Asian diasporic racial formations. This work builds on a long-standing research interest in the intersection of climate, race, and digital technologies. It is the basis of the Dark Laboratory, which she founded and leads as the Executive Director. Established for the study of Black and Indigenous ecologies, Dark Lab is housed at Hunter College and has been supported by the New Museum’s incubator for art and technology. Dr. Goffe graduated with an undergraduate degree in English literature at Princeton University before earning a PhD at Yale University where she continued studies on racial formation and global colonial desire.
Professor Goffe’s research has appeared or is forthcoming in several academic and popular publications including South Atlantic Quarterly, New York Magazine, Small Axe, Women and Performance, Boston Review, and Social Text. She is the Global Black History and Theory co-editor at Public Books, where she is accepting pitches. Her commentary and analyses have been quoted in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Vice Munchies. Dr. Goffe is currently completing two books under contract. The first After Eden: On the Racial Origins of Our Climate Crisis [(Doubleday, Hamish Hamilton (Penguin Books UK)], explores how 1492 was the genesis of the climate crisis. The second Black Capital, Chinese Debt (Duke University Press), explores a long Afro-Asian history of affective and financial indebtedness after the abolition of racial slavery from 1806 to the present.
She was elected to serve on the executive board of the American Studies Association (Nominating), Modern Language Association (Visual Culture), and American Comparative Literature Association (finance). She serves on the Advisory Committee of the Boys Club of New York, and the National Board of the Association of Asian American Yale Alumni. Prof. Goffe also enjoys attending technology roundtable discussions at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City, which she has been participating in since 2011.