Tia Glista

Victoria (Tia) Glista is a third-year PhD candiate in English whose research in feminist studies and critical theory spans literary, cinematic, and artistic production in the 20th and 21st-centuries. Her proposed dissertation on American feminist writers, “Posing Alternatives: Bodily Comportment and the Feminist Imagination,” sees gesture, posture, orientation, and movement as occasions for thinking about non-normative ethics, politics, and sociality, as well as invocations for re-conceiving practices of reading and interpretation with methods drawn from performance theory and film studies. She is working with literature from the 70s and 80s by Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, and Alice Munro, as well as artists’ texts and works of film, photography, and performance art by Martha Rosler, Lorna Simpson, Julie Dash, Ana Mendieta, and others.

She holds two MAs from U of T, in English and Cinema Studies respectively, as well as an individualized BA focusing on feminist visual culture, criticism, and art history from NYU. Her scholarship has appeared in journals such as Camera Obscura and Contemporary Women’s Writing, and she co-runs the annual feminist theory reading group “Feminist Orientations” with Abby Lacelle.

Tia’s essays and criticism for public audiences appear regularly in The Guardian, Los Angeles Review of Books, Document Journal, Public Books, Dazed, PAPER, AnOther, Office, and Electric Literature. She combines her interest in the moving body with her practice as a dancer and filmmaker, and has directed dance films and experimental shorts on Super 8.

List of Publications

• “Just Be There: Ethics and Aesthetics of the Surface in Mike Mills’ 20th Century Women,” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, 39: 2 (2024)
• “Miriam Toews’ Women Talking and the Embodied Life of Feminist Nonviolence,” Contemporary Women’s Writing, 17:1 (2023/24)
• Book Review: Ugly Freedoms by Elizabeth R. Anker, To be Decided*: Journal of Interdisciplinary Theory, Vol. 7 (2022)