Dr. Julietta Singh

Julietta Singh is Stephanie Bennett-Smith Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies and Professor of English at the University of Richmond. A nonfiction writer and postcolonial theorist, her work engages the enduring effects of colonization through attention to race, gender, ecology, and inheritance.

Singh is the author of three acclaimed books: The Breaks (Coffee House Press, 2021), a letter to her daughter about mothering through systemic racism and ecological catastrophe; No Archive Will Restore You (Punctum Books, 2018), an experimental feminist body memoir; and Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements (Duke UP, 2018), a critique of mastery that undergirds histories of anti-colonial thought.

She is also co-director, writer, and narrator of the award-winning feature documentary, The Nest (NFB Canada, 2025), a reclamation of forgotten feminist ancestors and an epic cross-community collaboration with Red River Métis, Deaf, and Japanese Canadian communities shot in her childhood home on Treaty 1 territory in Winnipeg, Canada.

The recipient of numerous awards including an ACLS Burkhardt Fellowship, Singh has been a visiting fellow at Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, Princeton University’s Humanities Council, and Arizona State University’s Center for Imagination in the Borderlands. Her nonfiction work has been celebrated by The Atlantic, The Paris Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Book Riot, Literary Hub, and the New York Public Library. Her scholarly work has appeared in venues such as South Atlantic Quarterly, Women & Performance, Social Text, Cultural Critique, and Studies in Gender and Sexuality.