TAPS/Comp Lit
Asya Sagnak is a joint PhD student in Theater and Performance Studies and Comparative Literature. She received her MA in the Humanities from the University of Chicago and her BA in Political Science from Barnard College. Her research focuses on the cultural and affective economies of self-starving protest performance, particularly in the Middle East. In this, she wishes to articulate a performance philosophy of decay—of that which degrades over time. She is attentive, first, to the body: to the materiality of bodily decay, and to the body’s decay under the carceral state. She wonders what collective subjecthood or futurity might be found under these circumstances. Her inquiries draw from the fields of performance studies, political theory, affect studies, poetics, and queer theory, as well as from ethnography and translation.
Asya is from Istanbul, Turkey. She loves photography and stone fruit. Prior to her arrival in Chicago, she was a writing consultant at Columbia University.