Postdoctoral Fellow, Visualizing Abolition

Savannah Kilner’s research, teaching, and public scholarship foreground refusals of visual and discursive regimes of property rooted in Indigenous dispossession and slavery and its afterlife. Working across Black, Indigenous, trans/queer, and carceral studies, her book project, Pride & Property: Queer Belonging and the Settler Temporality of Diversity, reveals how narratives of a “gay homeland” or “queer mecca” have been central to the carceral-colonial production of the San Francisco Bay Area, and thus to larger epistemologies of queer belonging in North America. It elucidates such contested entanglements—“pride and property”—while charting anti-colonial, abolitionist refusals of what she terms the settler temporality of diversity. Savannah received her Ph.D. in the Department of Gender Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles and B.A. in Ethnic Studies from Mills College. She is coeditor of Counterpoints: A Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance (PM Press, 2021), for which she co-curated “Indigenous Geographies of Resistance” with Dr. Margaret Ramírez. Savannah’s work has been supported by such organizations as the Social Science Research Council, Woodrow Wilson Foundation, UC Humanities Research Institute, and Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies.