Eli Dunn

Eliot “Eli” Dunn is a scholar working at the intersection of trans studies, contemporary literature, and queer digital cultures. They completed their doctorate in English at USC in 2023, where their dissertation examined time in digital transgender narratives from video games to memes to short fiction. In it they argue for a looping, multiversal transgender temporality which issues from a shared experience of gender misrecognition and its attendant feeling of doubling. The project finds that the trans temporal loop serves as a bridge between trans creators and the digital tools they manipulate, while also hinting at a path toward new vectors of narrative representation. Eli is now also at work on a project examining how fantasies of transmission, contagion and ‘community spread’ manifest themselves in queer literature published since PrEP debuted on the U.S. pharmaceutical market in 2012. 

Eli is currently a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the University of Southern California’s Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies. They received their MA in English from the University of Virginia in 2016 and their BA from University of California, Irvine in 2011. When Eli isn’t working, you might find them getting burned at dog beach with Biscuit and Momo, waiting in line for yet another cold brew, or playing D&D.

• BA Univ Calif Irvine
• MA Univ Virginia