Education

PhD, Duke University

MA, University of Wisconsin-Madison

BA, Smith College

Biography

Cole Rizki is a Latin Americanist and transgender studies scholar whose research examines the entanglements of transgender cultural production and activisms with histories of state violence and terror throughout the Américas. Rizki’s current book project, tentatively titled “Transfeminist Tide: Trans Politics Beyond Liberalism", examines Argentine travesti and trans politics and aesthetics to bring the study of democracy and its illiberal correlates to the forefront of trans studies. Moving across trans photographic archives of resistance, state intelligence and police archives, trans literary and cultural production, and activist practices that respond to state terror, his monograph establishes a new historical and cultural interpretation of trans politics as a response to illiberal state violence and its forms. Rizki is at work on a second monograph, tentatively titled “Hemispheric Trans Studies: American Transcultural Encounters and Practices.” This monograph will develop a distinct hemispheric orientation within the field of transgender studies by centering south-south exchanges to engage the work of theorists, political agents, and cultural producers working across Latin America and the US Global South. This project theorizes a travesti-trans of color analytic to track the geopolitics of repair and the reparative premises of both trans of color and travesti theory in the wake of multiple forms of state violence. He is invited guest editor of a special issue of NACLA: Report on the Americas on queer and trans resistance to violence (expected December 2024); co-editor of "Trans Studies en las Américas," a special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly on Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Trans Studies (May 2019); and TSQ’s current Translation Section Editor (2020-present). His recent article “Familiar Grammars of Loss and Belonging: Curating Trans Kinship in Post-Dictatorship Argentina” was short-listed for the International Association for Visual Culture and the Journal of Visual Culture Early Career Researcher Essay Prize. His work appears in or is forthcoming with journals such as TSQ, Journal of Visual Culture, Balam, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, and Radical History Review.