Author: Christy Wensley
Christy Wensley writes about dance and its attention to intersectional feminist and queer embodiment and radical possibility. Originally from California, she received her BA in English from Columbia University in New York City, and her MPhil in American Literature from Cambridge. Her undergraduate and MPhil work addressed issues of gender, aesthetics and empathy in Henry James’s major phase novels. Her current PhD, 'The "Hidden Slave" in Henry James' asks how we discover within James’s deliberately obscure style his ‘hidden’ subjects in direct relation to American slavery, the Civil War and postbellum (and ongoing) segregation and oppression of Black Americans. Her thesis proposes a deeper search into James’s relation to what continues to be a defining and damaging legacy of America’s economic, social, and political conditions: from his more overt references to slavery and the Civil War in the autobiographies, in his confrontation with his own and the nation’s nostalgic aesthetics and segregated states in The American Scene, to the metaphorics of slavery and blackness that are concealed within his fiction, particularly the uncomfortable meeting between his depictions of traumatized, idealized white femininity or queer masculinity and the realities of African American experience. Email: christy.wensley.16@ucl.ac.uk