Olivia Polk

Pre-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation Title:

"We Can Dream the Dark": Black Lesbianism and the Ethic of Black Queerness

Olivia Polk is a doctoral candidate in the departments of American Studies and African American Studies at Yale University. Polk's project, “We Can Dream the Dark,” excavates the archive of Black lesbian cultural production since 1977. It argues that this archive’s experiments in aesthetic form yields a robust social ethic— Black lesbianism— that has shaped Black queer radical politics from the early HIV/AIDS pandemic to contemporary responses the climate crisis.

African-American Studies

Yale University