About
Jay (Jess) Hasper is a PhD candidate in political theory. Their work primarily concerns activism and strategies for political mobilization, and intersects Black political thought, gender theory, and trans studies. Jay's dissertation, That We Live is Protest: A Conceptual History of Black Trans Resistance, employs archival and interpretive methods to construct a geneology of protest and self-making. Jay connects disparate moments of Black trans resistance across time and space, considering fugitivity and gender non-conformity in the Antebellum United States, resistance to state policing in Harlem ball culture (early 1930s), Pauli Murray's experiments with militant nonviolence (1940s), and Murray's participation in The Conference of Women of Africa and African Descent in 1960. Traveling through these contexts, Jay argues that Black trans worldmaking can help us better understand how ideas about resistance shaped 20th century political movements.
Before pursuing doctoral work at Michigan, Jay was a graduate student at the University of Virginia and Assistant Editor for the journal Political Theory.
