Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Thomas Dai is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of American Studies. His research and teaching interests include queer studies, Asian American literature and visual culture, and the environmental humanities. He is currently developing a dissertation that examines entomological figures and other cross-species intimacies within contemporary discourses on sexuality, race, and aesthetics. Alongside his academic work, he is also working on a book of creative nonfiction about travel and geography. Recent writing has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, Literary Hub, New England Review, and elsewhere. He has received support for his writing from Lambda Literary and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Prior to Brown, he earned an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Arizona and A.B. in Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University.