“These are not the stories that medicine necessarily wants us to tell, but that means it’s even doubly important that we try our best to track down these narratives.”

Victoria Papa
Victoria Papa is assistant professor of English at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. Her research examines the intersection of cultural trauma and experimental aesthetics in 20th- and 21st-century American literature. Her book project, “Minoritarian Modernisms: Quotidian Trauma and the Aesthetics of Survival,” reveals how modernists—who wrote about race, gender, sexuality, class, and ability from the periphery of a literary movement—make use of the aesthetic possibilities of literature to enact life-affirming counternarratives of recognition and resiliency.