Julia Koets, Assistant Professor
USF Department of English Assistant Professor Julia Koets was awarded a McKnight Junior Faculty Fellowship from the Florida Education Fund, a program that promotes excellence in teaching and research by underrepresented minorities and women. Fellows receive a one-year sabbatical to pursue research in special areas of interest. Koets will use this sabbatical to work on her fourth book, Villanelle, a book-length essay that explores queerness and loss, memory and poetry, and erasure and notions of archive—what stories have been told and recorded in public archives, and what stories from marginalized groups have been historically left out of the archives.
At the center of her exploration of queer loss and the archive is this question: when there is no record of a queer relationship, no trace in the public archive, how does this erasure sharpen the loss for queer individuals? Koets’ third book, PINE, which includes many of her own villanelles about growing up queer in the South, was published in April 2021.
