Linette ParkVisiting Assistant Professor

Linette Park is a Visiting Assistant Professor in African American Studies at Emory University. She received her B.A. in Studio Art from the University of California, Los Angeles, her M.A. in Critical Studies: Aesthetics and Politics from the California Institute of the Arts, and a second MA and her Ph.D. in Culture and Theory from the University of California Irvine. At UC Irvine, she earned emphases in Critical Theory and Law, Culture, and Society and was the recipient of the Michael and Stacey Koehn Award in Critical Theory. Prior to joining Emory, Dr. Park was the Thurgood Marshall Fellow in the African and African American Studies Program at Dartmouth College. She was also a postdoctoral fellow in the African American Studies Department at Pennsylvania State University, a member of the Emerging Scholars Cohort in Political Theology program, and awarded the University of California- New Center for Psychoanalysis Interdisciplinary Hayman Fellowship. 

Her research interests are in the areas of critical black theories/ Black Studies, carceral studies, gender and sexuality studies, psychoanalysis, continental philosophy, philosophy of law, visual art and film, and the afterlife of slavery and lynching in North America. Her first book monograph, under advanced contract with Stanford University Press, examines the present-day “lynching” arrests of nonviolent demonstrators with the Movement for Black Lives. It traces a genealogy of the penal code that authorizes these arrests while also interrogating their historical, political, and psycho-social articulations, particularly in respect to their implications on gender, sexuality, and anti-blackness. Dr. Park has published and forthcoming work in the peer-reviewed journals: Theory and Event, The Black Scholar, Souls, Journal of Critical Ethnic Studies, b2o, Political Theology, and is the editor of a special issue on black resistance for Diacritics.

Before academia, Dr. Park has organized political education on the economy and expansion of prisons in re-entry homes for formerly incarcerated women and gender non-conforming (GNC) people in California. She has also worked as a community support educator for youth with mental and intellectual dis/abilities. She plans to return to these twin concerns in her future work.