Amy Sara Carroll

PhD (Duke University)
MFA (Cornell University)

Associate Professor of Literature and Writing

Amy Sara Carroll received an AB in Anthropology and Creative Writing (Poetry) from Princeton University (1990), an MA in Anthropology from the University of Chicago (1993), an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Cornell University (1995), and a PhD in Literature from Duke University (2004). At Duke she also received certificates in Latin American and Caribbean Studies and Women’s Studies. Dr. Carroll was a 2005-2006 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Latino Studies at Northwestern University; a Summer 2006 recipient of a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship; a 2011 NEH Summer Seminar participant; the Summer 2015 Poet in Residence at the University of Mississippi; a 2017-2018 Fellow in Cornell’s Society for the Humanities and a 2018-2019 Fellow in the University of Texas at Austin’s Latino Research Initiative. Her books include SECESSION (Hyperbole Books, an imprint of SDSU Press, 2012), winner of the University of Michigan’s 2013 Louis I. Bredvold Prize for Scholarly or Creative Publication and the 2013 Golden Crown Literary Society (GCLS) Poetry Award;  FANNIE + FREDDIE/ The Sentimentality of Post-9/11 Pornography (Fordham UP, 2013), chosen by Claudia Rankine for Fordham University’s 2012 Poets Out Loud Prize; and  REMEX: Toward an Art History of the NAFTA Era (University of Texas Press, 2017), which received honorable mention for the 2017 Modern Language Association Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize, honorable mention for the 2018 Latin American Studies Association Mexico Section Best Book in the Humanities, honorable mention for the 2019 Association for Latin American Art-Arvey Foundation Book Award, and was shortlisted for the 2018 Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize. Since 2008, she has been a member of Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0, coproducing the  Transborder Immigrant Tool. The project has been exhibited in various venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Francisco’s Galería de la Raza; ZKM | Museum of Contemporary Art, Queens Museum of Art, and the 2010 California Biennial. She coauthored with other members of EDT 2.0 several plays and [({   })] The Desert Survival Series/La serie de sobrevivencia del desierto (Office of Net Assessment/University of Michigan Digital Environments Cluster Publishing Series, 2014). Published under a Creative Commons license, the volume has been digitally redistributed by  CTheory Books (2015), the  Electronic Literature Collection 3 (2016), CONACULTA E-Literatura/Centro de Cultura Digital (2016), and HemiPress (2017) . Since Summer 2010, Dr. Carroll has participated in Mexico City’s alternative arts space SOMA.

Teaching interests: creative writing (poetry, creative non-fiction, performance, visual and e-literatures, cross-genre writing); twentieth and twenty-first century Latin/x American art, literature, and cinema; transnational American and border studies; critical theory; cultural studies; ethnic studies; and gender and sexuality studies.

MONOGRAPH

REMEX: Toward an Art History of the NAFTA Era. Austin: The University of Texas Press (Mellon Latin American and Caribbean Arts and Culture publishing initiative), 2017.

POETRY COLLECTIONS

FANNIE + FREDDIE/The Sentimentality of Post-9/11 Pornography (with a foreword by Claudia Rankine). New York: Fordham University Press, 2013 (distributed by Fordham and Oxford University Presses).

SECESSION (a full-color collection of poems and prints with an introduction by Holly Hughes, two critical essays by Laura Gutiérrez and Evie Shockley, and two interviews with Amy Sara Carroll by Heidi Bean and Carlos Amador and Rachel Price). San Diego: Hyperbole Books (an imprint of San Diego State University Press), 2012.

COLLABORATIVELY AUTHORED CROSS-GENRE VOLUME

[({    })] The Desert Survival Series / La serie de sobrevivencia del desierto (bilingual edition, Creative Commons license), Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab, computer code by Brett Stalbaum and Jason Najarro, poetry and statement by Carroll, Spanish translations by Francheska Alers-Rojas, Julieta Aranda, Elizabeth Barrios, Carroll, Iván Chaar-López, Natasha Hakimi Zapata, Orquídea Morales, Omar Pimienta  and Mary Renda. Ann Arbor: The Office of Net Assessment (The University of Michigan Digital Environments Cluster Publishing Series, coordinators Tung-Hui Hu and John Cheney-Lippold), 2014. 

Digital redistribution

• CTHEORY and CTheory Books BLUESHIFT series, edited by Arthur and Marilouise Kroker. University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, 2015. Web.
• Electronic Literature Collection 3, edited by ELC3 Collective Stephanie Boluk, Leonardo Flores, Jacob Garbe, and Anastasia Salter, 2016. Web.
• CONACULTA E-Literatura/Centro de Cultura Digital Editorial and Revista 404 (Mexico City, Mexico), with interview with Carroll and Ricardo Dominguez by Lorena Gómez Mostajo, Mónica Nepote, and Ximena Atristain, “La herramienta transfronteriza para inmigrantes,” 2016. Web.
• Truthdig, Arts & Culture section, complete set of poems published serially, 2016-2017. Web.
• Hemi Press (Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics Publications, New York University, New York, NY), multilingual TOME edition (Gestures series) with Nahuatl translations of poetry by Martín Vega Olmedo and Eduardo de la Cruz Cruz, Mixe translations of poetry by Luis Balbuena Gómez, and essays by Ashley Ferro-Murray and Sergio Delgado, 2017. Web.

CO-EDITED VOLUME

Aster(ix): A Journal of Literature, Art, Criticism (“The Poetry Issue”), co-edited by Carroll, Saretta Morgan, and Marta Lucía Vargas, Winter 2020.

REFEREED ESSAYS

“When School is a Factory, Where is Ana Mendieta?” The Volta, “Evening Will Come: A Monthly Journal of Poetics” 65 (“Poetry and | of | in Power” special issue, edited by Evie Shockley), April 2017. Web.

Reprint: Best American Experimental Writing 2018, guest-edited by Myung Mi Kim. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2018. 51-55.

“[The Fiction of a Doorframe] Further Notes on Undocumentation,” Media Fields Journal 12 (“Media and Migration” special issue, edited by Bianka Ballina and Carlos Jiménez), January 2017. 1-10. Web.

“From Papapapá to Sleep Dealer: Alex Rivera’s Undocumentary Poetics,” Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture 19.3-4 (“Political Documentary Cinema in Latin America: Concepts, Histories, Experiences” special issue, edited by Kristi Wilson and Antonio Traverso), May-July 2013: 485-500.

Reprint: Wilson, Kristi and Antonio Traverso, eds. Political Documentary Cinema in Latin America. New York and London: Routledge, 2014. 211-226.

“Global Mexico’s Coproduction: Babel, Pan’s Labyrinth, and Children of Men,” The Journal of Transnational American Studies 4.2 (2012) (“Revolutions and Heterotopias” special issue, edited by Micol Seigel, Lessie Jo Frazier, and David Sartorius). 1-30. Web.

“EDT 1.0, EDT 2.0, EDT 3.0” and selection of poetry from the Transborder Immigrant Tool, Errata# Revista de Artes Visuales 3 (“Cultura Digital y Creación/Digital Culture and Creation” special issue), December 2010: 40-64.

“ Muerte sin fin: Teresa Margolles’s Gendered States of Exception,” The Drama Review (TDR) 54.2 (T206) , Summer 2010: 103–125.

“‘Accidental Allegories’ Meet ‘The Performative Documentary’: Boystown, Señorita Extraviada, and the Border- Brothel→Maquiladora Paradigm,” SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 31.2, Winter 2006: 357-396.

“A Critical Regionalism: The Allegorical Performative in Madre por un día and the Rodríguez/Felipe Wedding,” e-misférica 2.2 (“Sexualities and Politics in the Americas” special issue, edited by Antonio Prieto Stambaugh), November 2005. 1-15. Web.

“Incumbent upon Recombinant Hope: EDT’s Strike a Site, Strike a Pose,” The Drama Review (TDR) 47.2 (T178), Summer 2003: 145-150.  

ESSAYS IN EDITED VOLUMES

“Lesbianism-Poetry//Poetry-Lesbianism,” The Cambridge Companion to Lesbian Literature, edited by Jodie Medd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 188-203.

“Code switch: The Transborder Immigrant Tool” and selection of poetry from the project (with translations by Yanoula Athanassakis [Greek], Lili Hsieh and Zona Yi-Ping Tsou [Mandarin Chinese], and Tatiana Sizonenko [Russian]), Somatic Engagement, edited by Petra Kuppers. San Francisco: Chain Links, 2011. 19-35.

“La lateralización de la historia, Maquilapolis y el efecto de los años 2000 y 2001,” Representación y fronteras: el performance en los límites del género, edited by Hortensia Moreno and Stephany Slaughter. México: UNAM/PUEG/UNIFEM, 2009. 187-201.

CATALOGUE AND EXHIBITION ESSAYS

“Consummate ‘PIAS Forms’: Periodizing Mexico’s 1990s,” catalogue essay for the exhibition Below the Underground: Renegade Art and Action in 1990s Mexico, curator Irene Tsatsos. Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA (“Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA,” The Getty Foundation), 2020. 26-43.

“As Darkroom Is to Light Box, Lourdes Grobet’s Hora y media is to Ingrid Hernández’s La maquila golondrina,” The Matter of Photography in the Americas, edited by Natalia Brizuela and Jodi Roberts. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press and Cantor Arts Center, 2018. 128-133.

“ El derecho de réplica: Performance—Lorena Wolffer—Performatividad,” exhibition essay for Lorena Wolffer/Expuestas: registros públicos (July-October 2015), Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City, Mexico, 2015. 23-27.

“Tina Modotti’s ‘Wonderfull’/Lo ‘Wonderfull’ de Tina Modotti,” commissioned post on Open Space in response to the exhibition Photography in Mexico, the SFMOMA blog, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, June 2012. 1-2. Web.

“Todos Somos Echolalia: A Response to Becoming Transreal,” The Transreal: Aesthetics and Politics of Crossing Realities, edited by Zach Blas and Wolfgang Schirmacher. New York/Dresden: Atropos Press, 2012. 85-89.

COLLABORATIVELY AUTHORED PLAYS, ESSAYS, AND PORTFOLIOS

“The Other Balcony per Genet (a scene without distance),” by Carroll, Ricardo Dominguez, and Césaire Carroll-Domínguez, Imagined Theatres (04 “Emergency”), April 2020. Web.

“Of Co-Investigations and Aesthetic Sustenance: A Conversation between Colectivo Situaciones and Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab,” by Carroll, Ricardo Dominguez, and Colectivo Situaciones, Collective Situations: Readings in Contemporary Latin American Art, 1995-2010, edited by Grant H. Kester and Bill Kelley Jr., Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. 309-320.

Operation Faust & Furioso: A Trans [    ] border Play on the Redistribution of the Sensible, Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab with special guest appearances by Flavia Meireles, Alex Olson, Rolando Palacio, and Katia Tirado, edited by Carroll and Ricardo Dominguez, Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA) 21.1 (special issue coordinators Mimi Sheller and Hana Iverson), January 2016. 28-42.

Six nanopoems created with an electron force microscope plus collective statement, *particle group*, BathHouse Journal 11.2 (“Radicalism: Part 2” special issue), May 2014. Web.

“Media dislocativa, una historia de fantasmas (o como frotar piedras en el nombre de trans-cuerpos por convertir-se)/“Dislocative Media, A Ghost Story (or how to rub two stones together in the name of trans [  ] bodies to be/come),” by Carroll and Ricardo Dominguez, SITAC IX Teoría y práctica de la catastrophe catalogue, edited by Eduardo Abaroa, Mexico City: PAC/SITAC, 2013. 124-141; 346-362.

“The Transborder Immigrant Tool,” Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab with Grant Wahlquist (interview/essay), 2010 California Biennial (catalogue), curator Sarah C. Bancroft. Newport Beach, California: Orange County Museum of Art and DelMonico Books, Prestel, 2010. 56-59.

Sustenance: A Play for All Trans [    ] Borders, Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab, edited by Carroll and Ricardo Dominguez. New York: Printed Matter, Inc., July 2010.

Reprint: Vandal (“[In]Security” special issue), December 2011, includes an interview with Carroll and Dominguez by Aydé Enríquez-Loya. 48-73.

Reprint: Manifesto Now! Instructions for Performance, Philosophy, Politics, edited by Laura Cull & Will Daddario, Bristol, UK/Chicago, USA: Intellect Ltd., 2013, 159-174 (distributed by the University of Chicago Press).

Nanosférica, *particle group* portfolio, eds. Carroll and Ricardo Dominguez. “Multimedios,” e-misférica 6.1 (special issue on “Contagion”), Summer 2009. Web.