Grace Lavery is a writer, editor, and academic living in Brooklyn, NY. As an Associate Professor of English, Critical Theory, and Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, her research explores the history and theory of aesthetics and interpretation, with particular interests in psychoanalysis, literary realism, and queer and trans cultures. Her speculative memoir, Please Miss, was published by Seal Press in 2022.
Her first book, Quaint, Exquisite: Victorian Aesthetics and the Idea of Japan, was published by Princeton University Press in 2019, and her scholarly essays have been published in Critical Inquiry, Differences, Social Text Online, Transgender Studies Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is a General Editor of Transgender Studies Quarterly. She writes for non-specialist readerships on queer/trans culture and politics, and has published work in Autostraddle, The Guardian, Gay Magazine, them, and Catapult, where she has an occasional film column entitled “Lurid Speculations.”
Grace has a husband named Daniel and a Japanese Chin named Bon-Bon. She enjoys cooking and walking.