Dr. Victoria Papa

About Me

In my research and teaching, I explore how writers and artists imagine embodiment, illness, and care beyond the limits of rationalist and ableist frameworks, with particular attention to experimental and esoteric aesthetic practices. Animated by feminist, queer, decolonial, and posthumanist methods, I am especially interested in how art and literature reorient perception to conjure otherwise worlds.

In my courses, I encourage students to regard learning as an ongoing process that allows room for risk and reward, vulnerability and achievement, challenge and ease. I prompt students to view the study of literature, and visual culture as a creative act in and of itself. My syllabi feature 20th- and 21st-century authors and artists from a multitude of positionalities. My courses take an immersive approach to the study of literature and art: field trips to local museums, guest lectures, somatic activities, and collaborative course projects are common. 

Research Interests

My book project, Subtle Bodies: Illness and Esoteric Aesthetics, traces how modern and contemporary writers and visual artists draw from occluded knowledge and esoteric practices to shapeshift experiences of bodily, psychic, and social illness. My writing has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Women & Performance, Modernism/modernity, ASAP/Review, Public Books, and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, among others. My work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Beinecke Library, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. My recent curatorial projects include Ecologies of the In\between, a group exhibition at MCLA's Gallery 51 (2025). 

I am the co-creator of CARE SYLLABUS—a public humanities and arts project focused on care, justice, and creative practice, developed in collaboration with MASS MoCA.

Selected Publications

“In Conversation: Johanna Hedva with Victoria Papa,” The Brooklyn Rail (2025)

“Queer Kinship among the Stars: H.D., Silvia Dobson, and Astrology,” Modernism/modernity Print+ (2024)

“Beyond Care,” The Brooklyn Rail (2024)

“Permission to Wonder: The Palimpsestic Interplay of H.D. and Freud,” Modernist Cultures (2023)

“Interfacing Grief: Haptic Autotheory & Performance as Afterlife in Anne Carson’s Nox,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory (2022)

“Care and the Contingencies of Critique,” ASAP/J (2021)

“Clean, Original, Primitive”: Sexual Radicalism, Race Consciousness, and the Case of Harlem’s Queers,” Modernism/modernity Print+ (2021)

“The Art of Care: Susannah Cahalan on Madness, Diagnosis, and COVID-19,” Public Books (2020)

"Embodied Haunting: Aesthetics and the Archive in Toni Morrison's Beloved" in Madness in Black Women's Fictions: Aesthetics of Resistance and the Practice of Diaspora. Ed. Caroline Brown and Johanna Garvey. London: Palgrave Macmillan (2017)

Features in MCLA News

MCLA Professor Reflects on Fellowship at Yale's Beinecke Library (Fall 2022)

Leading Classes, and National Conversations, on Care and the Therapeutic Arts (Spring 2022)

New MCLA/MASS MoCA Collaboration Explores the Meaning of Care (Fall 2020)

MCLA English Professor to Complete Brandeis University Fellowship (Fall 2020)