Janice Feng

Janice Feng is a 2022 WW Women's Studies Fellow at the Institute for Citizens and Scholars and Richard and Lilian Ives Graduate Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan for 2022-2023. She has also been a Graduate Fellow at the D'Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the Newberry Library. Her work has also been supported by the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, the International Institute, Rackham Graduate School, and the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan. She is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan, where she has also completed a certificate in Women's and Gender's Studies in 2021. She holds a MA in Political Science and Cultural, Social, and Political Thought from the University of Victoria, and a BA in Political Science and Philosophy from the University of Alberta. 

Her dissertation, entitled “Towards a Decolonial Account of Desire: The Cultivation of Desire and Indigenous Women’s Self-Making and Resistance in Early Modern French North America,” examines the cultivation of desire—affective and embodied attachment—and management of bodies in early modern French imperial imaginary and settler colonial-rule in Nouvelle-France (present day Québec and the Great Lakes area). Bringing together literary texts and political treatises, missionary reports and letters, and Indigenous material culture practices and oral history, I develop an alternative theoretical framework to examine empire and modern colonialism. She shows that the cultivation of desire was central to early modern European imperial gender ideology, concrete settler colonial techniques of power, and Indigenous women’s self-making and resistance. Putting these diverse sources and practices together, she explores how Indigenous women drew from various resources, such as cultivating land and literary practices, to cultivate their desire socially and politically, in order to stage unqiue forms of self-making under duress and enact resistance. 

Janice's work has appeared in the History of European Ideas, Theory & Event, Revue internationale de philosophie, and is forthcoming in Canadian Settler Colonialism.  

For more information, please visit her website: https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/janicefeng/ 

Fields of Study:

• Political Theory 
• Feminist and Queer Theory 
• Settler-Colonial and Indigenous Studies