Graduate Student
she/her
kpwhite@umich.edu
Office Information:
Research and Teaching Interests: Transgender studies, queer/trans of color critique, transnational American studies, Latinx studies, Cuba and the Caribbean, life writing (testimonio, memoir, autoethnography), critical ethnography.
American Culture
About
Kerry M. White is an ethnographer of trans life in the Americas. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of American Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where her research broadly examines the ways in which gender and sexuality are mediated by race and empire in the Americas. Her dissertation, “Trans Sisterhood at the Edge of Empire: Transfeminist Testimonios between Cuba and the United States” draws on years of political solidarity; (auto)ethnographic engagement with Afro-feminist, queer, and trans community in Cuba and its diaspora; and extensive testimonial life history interviews to examine the role of sisterhood, solidarity, and networks of care within the life stories of trans women living at the edges of U.S. empire. Earlier writing on Afro-feminist and queer activism in Havana has been published in Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism. In all of her research, she works to blur the genres of life writing—from testimonio, to memoir, to (auto)ethnography—in order to reflexively engage with the power of storytelling and the need to find new modes of representing the self and other. Kerry has served as a Graduate Student Instructor for Introduction to Latina/o Studies, American Values, and Introduction to Women's and Gender Studies. Previously, she received a master’s degree in Latin American Studies from the University of Florida and a bachelor’s degree from Lewis & Clark College.
