Tanya Fernando

Tanya Fernando received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago as the Andrew W. Mellon Fellow. She works on both modernism and the contemporary arts—the literary, visual, and performing arts. She is currently completing a manuscript, “The Politics of Shock: Modernism, Primitivism, and Aesthetics.” The book explores how modernist artists used ‘shock’ as a radical technique to create a just world. It examines work by Vaslav Nijinsky and Igor Stravinksy, Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, the Post-Impressionists, the Surrealists, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno. Fernando views writing as fluid: her scholarship and creative work each inform the other. She is writing a new play, “The Archduke,” a meditation on Beethoven, Adornian philosophy, and the Civil Rights Movement. Fernando serves as the performance editor for the Massachusetts Review.

 www.tanyafernando.com