Laura Westengard

Laura Westengard (she/they) is a professor of English at New York City College of Technology, CUNY. She serves on the board of directors at CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies and is the Coordinator and inaugural faculty member for the new Advanced Certificate in LGBTQ Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. Laura sits on the advisory board for WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly and on the editorial board for the Peter Lang book series Vampire Studies: New Perspectives on the Undead. Her book Gothic Queer Culture: Marginalized Communities and the Ghosts of Insidious Trauma (University of Nebraska Press, 2019) shows how queer culture adopts gothicism to challenge heteronormative and racialized systems and practices and to acknowledge the effects of microaggression and insidious trauma on queer communities.