About
Iris Blake is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of American Studies. Their research and teaching interests include sound studies, critical ethnic studies, queer and feminist disability studies, and cultural production.Her book manuscript, Undisciplining the Voice, interrogates how coloniality has shaped knowledge about the voice and analyzes sound installation, multimedia performance, and visual art as alternative archives for voicing and listening. Her analysis emphasizes how contemporary artists activate the interplay between environment, technology, and embodiment in relation to structures of colonialism and heteropatriarchy, inviting their audiences to become co-participants in undisciplined pedagogies of voicing and listening. Iris is currently revising this project to account for their shifting embodiment and listening practice as a newly hard of hearing scholar.
Prior to joining UMBC, Iris was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Loyola Marymount University, where she taught courses engaging critical race and transnational feminisms, Indigenous feminist theories, queer theory, and abolition. From 2020-2022, Iris was a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLA, where they were affiliated with the Department of Musicology and the Practice-Based Experimental Epistemology Research (PEER) Lab, which aims to decolonize methodologies and analysis of music, sound, and the senses. While earning her PhD in Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside, Iris’s work was supported by the Center for Ideas and Society, and she contributed to the Humanities Action Lab’s Climates of Inequality public memory project via the Humanities Careers in Science History, Policy, and Communication program.
Research interests
sound studies, critical ethnic studies, queer and feminist disability studies, performance studies, cultural productionTeaching interests
critical ethnic studies, cultural studies, memory studies, gender & sexuality studiesEducation
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Ph D, Ethnic Studies
— University of California, Riverside (2020) Unsettling the Coloniality of Voice
- MA, Ethnic Studies — University of California, Riverside (2016)
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Other, Ethnomusicology
— University of Texas at Austin (2013) Burlesque: Music, Minstrelsy, and Mimetic Resistance
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BA, Music, French
— Arizona State University (2010) Gender, Race, and Class in the Phoenix Indie Scene