Leila Easa (she/her) researches modes by which power determines how authors tilt the practice of disclosure through writing, speech, revision, excision, and silence. Her broad areas of focus include gender and ethnicity studies, poetics, elegy, and protest in the context of twentieth-century and contemporary American literature. Born to a Palestinian American father and Southern mother, Leila is interested in regional identities and the complex relationship Palestinians have to the concept of “home.” In addition to her work at UC Davis, Leila teaches in the English and Women's and Gender Studies departments at City College of San Francisco.

Current Interests: Theories of the Lyric, Palestinian American Poetry, Protest and Palimpsest Poetry, Elegy and Memorialization, Dance and Literature, Literature and Cartography, Literary Translation, Feminist Citation, Fat Studies, Children's and Young Adult Literature

Publications:

Public Feminism in Times of Crisis: From Sappho's Fragments to Global Hashtags (Lexington Books, August 2022), cowritten with Dr. Jennifer Stager.

Public Feminism in Times of Crisis is a book of essays in classical receptions and feminist criticism developed in connection to ongoing political and epidemiological crises and the significant intersectional feminist response to this moment. The book examines the public practice of feminism in the age of social media and analyzes the deep histories threaded through this new(er) enactment. Six chapters explore the Venus tradition and the archive; feminist biography and #MeToo as map; feminist translation; the collective lyric I and citational justice; virality and new materialism; and decentralized monuments and memorializing. The book’s methodology weaves together traditional academic research and public-facing media, practicing the very tools that it analyzes.

With gratitude to our editor and press, we have made a selection from our introduction open access. 

"Overwriting the Monument Tradition: lists, loss, and scale,” cowritten with Dr. Jennifer Stager, appears in RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 75/76 (Fall 2021), https://doi.org/10.1086/717461. 

While our contemporary moment invites necessary engagement with fallism (the practice of toppling monuments of symbols of oppressive power), we wish to instead identify and narrate a parallel heritage to that of the traditional figural monument critiqued by such practices. We suggest that this parallel tradition, which runs from ancient Greece to contemporary times, can itself offer new forms of possibility to engage and include a more diverse set of voices while also remaining grounded in historical precedent. Building on Athena Kirk’s theory of apodeixis, a practice of making a list visual, “Overwriting the Monument Tradition” traces this history of apodeictic monuments from the ancient Greek casualty lists set up in Athens in the fifth century BCE to Maya Lin’s Washington, DC Vietnam memorial to the epigraphs for one thousand of the first one hundred thousand deaths from Covid-19 in the United States on the cover of the New York Times on May 24, 2020 CE to contemporary poetry, protest, and performance. Ultimately, we argue that this tradition mobilizes naming and the poetic power of the list to elevate not singular hegemony but instead a plurality of raised voices. 

LOCATING A COLLECTIVE LYRIC “I,” a special folio (print and open-access digital) coedited with Jennifer Stager in The Hopkins Review 17.1, brings together essays, poetry, visual arts, audio, and genre-defying fusions. Many contributions draw on the deep past, yet this work feels urgent and timely as it grapples with the subjectivity of poet, scholar, and artist; with racialization, gender and sexuality; with the climate crisis; with war; with mourning; with craft and handwork; and with the pleasures and frictions of being in the world together.

List of contributors: Sarah Beckmann, William Camponovo, Bethany Dixon, Sasha-Mae Eccleston, Ella Gonzalez, Sean Gordon, Pia Hargrove, Briony Hughes, Christine Hume, Virginia Jackson, Les James, Jennifer Keohane, Laura Larson, Michael Leong, Steven Levya, Naomi Shihab Nye, David Ishaya Osu, Related Tactics, Margaret Ronda, Yuki Tanka, Eleni Theodoropoulos, Kandis Williams

introduction * digital folio * print folio (Project Muse) * index-as art.

A short-form version of a longer piece on abortion, cowritten with Dr. Jennifer Stager, “Subjects and Verbs: The Past, Present, and Future Tenses of Abortion Rhetoric” appears in Post45’s Abortion Now, Abortion Forever cluster (June 2023).

U.S. activist abortion rhetoric can be viewed as a collective abortion story that shaped both policy and epistemology around reproduction in the United States and participated in the work of nationalism. Specifically, the framework of “choice” activated by many interest groups—itself a hedge against conservative “life” rhetoric—connected abortion access to Americanness itself. Yet in contemporary discourse, new frameworks have emerged that question the capitalist and individualist underpinnings of choice, instead emphasizing relationality and continuity between the human and nonhuman. We trace the history of this shift in the context of Lena Chen’s participatory art installation, “We Lived in the Gaps Between the Stories,” which presents abortifacients and emmenagogues to (re)imagine reproductive management through an alignment with plant life. Chen’s project brings attention to ancient herbs in the present while also engaging the history of private and nonarchival practices of reproductive management that precede the nation state in modernity —the sharing of methods, materials, and treatments in networks that exist outside of legally sanctioned frameworks. Exploring such histories, practices, and materials allows us to consider an abortion story that moves beyond choice to foreground interdependence.

"Memorializing as Fallism’s Feminist Alternative," cowritten with Dr. Jennifer Sager, appears on the West of England and South Wales Women's History Network Blog (December 20, 2021).

While the past few years have brought deep international engagement with the idea and practice of fallism--the practice of toppling monuments that symbolize patriarchal power and often white supremacy--we identify and narrate a parallel heritage to that of the traditional masculine figural monument critiqued by such practices. We understand this list-based tradition to represent a feminist approach to mourning and memorializing, especially in its focus on individuals over the emblematic. We suggest that this parallel feminist tradition, stretching from ancient Greece to contemporary times, can help us contextualize both the history of such memorialization and its current practice.

Fellowships and Awards:

2023-2024 Chancellor's Doctoral Incentive Program Fellow

2022-2023 Mellon Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies fellow for the project “Palestinian American Women’s Poetry: Contesting and Constructing Home through Articulation and Embodiment”

2022-2023 University of California, Davis Provost’s Fellowship in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences

Graduate Student Association Travel Award, University of California, Davis, Fall 2022

James & Roberta Woodress Endowed Fund International Travel and Research Award, Spring 2023

Education:

MFA, San Francisco State University, Creative Writing 

MA, University College London, Anglo-American Literary Relations

BA, Duke University, English