Office Hours

Fall 2026 are by appointment.

Spring 2027 will be Tuesday and Wednesday 10-12. 

Get to know Eli

I am a writer, creator, and scholar who researches and writes about activism, performance, and creativity. Her book The Revolution Will Be Improvised: Intimacy and Performance of the Civil Rights Movement (University of Michigan Press, 2024) is a multidisciplinary study of creative activism and performance by artists and revolutionaries in the 1960s and 70s and centers people of color in the history of American experimental art. My scholarly writing focuses on migration, decolonial approaches to space, the civil rights movement, African American and Latinx literature and culture, and performance and appears in Journal of American Studies, Studies in the Literary Imagination, PMLA, Crossings: A Journal of Migration and Culture, The Global South, Record Document Archive, and contribute to handbooks for theater studies and southern studies. 

I also publish in creative non-fiction and poetry, including in The Common, Voices from the Prairie, Flere Magazine, Elsewhere, and Brink. As an artist and writer, I am co-collaborator on the project, Unwanted Ecologies, which combines performance, video and writing to challenge the colonial logic of invasive species. I express myself through film and performance and have exhibited my work at Open Air Media Festival, Dubuque Museum of Art, and Refocus Film Festival. I’ve studied book arts at the Women’s Studio Workshop and received a fellowship from the Center for Book Arts in New York to develop part of a chapter for my current manuscript on weird philosophies of the body and illness. 

I teach courses in performance studies, queer theory, LGBTQ literature and culture, Latinx literature and culture, activism, hybrid and experimental literature, and in special topics such as coffee and gardening. Beyond the English Department, I teach dance classes and have lead workshops in queer zines and book-making.

Research interests

• 20th and 21st century transnational
• American studies
  African American and Latinx literatures and cultures
• Performance studies
• Women of color feminism
• Southern studies

Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder CV