Ari Burford, PhD
Senior Lecturer
Bldg 70 Rm #229
Phone: 928-523-6719
Ari.Burford@nau.edu
Dr. Ari Burford earned their PhD in English with an emphasis in feminist theory and literature in 2007 from the University of Arizona and began teaching at NAU in 2009. Their dissertation is an intervention into women’s rights histories by recognizing literature that resisted heteropatriarchal colonialist violence against Chican@s and Indigenous people in the late nineteenth century, writers who also critiqued women’s rights’ alliances and complicity with white supremacy. Dr. Burford has published articles in Genders and The Journal of Lesbian Studies. Their current writing project is a queer memoir about resilience, about surviving incest, about calling attention to white supremacist colonialist heteropatriarchy. Dr. Ari has a passion for teaching, critical thinking and community action and resistance, dance, poetry, feminism, queer studies, nature, and creativity all of which they think of as interconnected. At NAU, Dr. Burford co-facilitated the start up of the Queer Studies minor, along with Dr. Karla Hackstaff and Dr. Jaclyn Pryor, as well as the first-year LGBTQIA Living Learning Community. Dr. Burford also wrote the proposal to get funding for NAU’s LGBTQIA Office of Resources and Support.
Interests
- Queer and Trans Studies
- Queer Literature
- Indigenous Studies and Decolonizing Pedagogy
- Anti-racist, Anti-cissexist, Anti-Ableist, Decolonizing Anti-capitalist Queer Poetry, Poetics, Performance, especially Slam
- Feminist Theories
- Art, Community Action, and Resilience
- Theory and Action that combats rape culture, including interpartner and workplace violence, war, and the prison industrial complex
- Memoir and Disrupting Hegemonic History
- Health and Healing
- Trauma Studies
Courses
Accomplishments
Attendee at “Black Life Matters” Conference in Tucson, AZ. January 17-19th, 2015.
Presenting chapter two of manuscript from their memoir at “Writing by Writers” Workshop in Tomales Bay, CA and working directly with Dorothy Allison. October 21-25, 2015.
“Her Mouth is Medicine”: Beth Brant’s and Paula Gunn Allen’s decolonizing queer erotics.” Journal of Lesbian Studies 17(2): 167-179. 2013.
Presented a paper at ‘(Im)possible Queer International Feminisms’, University of Sussex, 17-19 May 2013.
Publications
“Her Mouth is Medicine”: Beth Brant’s and Paula Gunn Allen’s Queer Erotics as Decolonizing Methodologies.” The Journal of Lesbian Studies 17.2 (2013): 167-179.
“Cartographies of a Violent Landscape: Helena María Viramontes’s and Cherríe Moraga’s Remapping of Feminisms in Under the Feet of Jesus and Heroes and Saints.” Genders 47 (2008).
“Harriet Tubman: The Life and Stories.” Book review of Jean Humez’s Harriet Tubman: The Life and Stories. Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association 61.2 (2007).
“Communities of Silence and Music in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage.” Selections from the Eighth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. Ed. Davis, Laura and Jeanette McVicker. New York: Pace UP, 1999. 269-75.