Dr. Kimberly Bain is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia—Vancouver. In her scholarly and critical-creative work, her most pressing and urgent concerns have consolidated around questions of the history, theory, and philosophy of: the African diaspora, race, gender, environmental and medical racism, and Black arts and letters.
She is currently at work on two scholarly monographs. The first, entitled On Black Breath, traces a genealogy of breathing and Blackness in the United States. It takes seriously the charge of “I can’t breathe” and considers breath as more than the mere metaphor—rather, as also a somatic and sociopolitical phenomenon that has resonances in the wake of enslavement to the contemporary moment.
Her second book, Dirt: Soil and Other Dark Matter, turns to dirt for understanding how Blackness—a series of relations that have emerged as part of extractive and accumulative logics—has shaped global considerations of the Anthropocene and refused the extractive relations of racial capitalism. Her writing has appeared in Social Text, The Journal of Literature and Medicine, Protean Magazine, capilano review, Studies in Romanticism, Qui Parle, and the book Lastgaspism: Art and Survival in the Age of the Pandemic. She has essays forthcoming on Blackness and soil, Black holes, pettiness, and other topics in several edited collections and exhibition catalogs.