Candice Amich

Associate Professor of English
Director of Graduate Studies

Candice Amich joined Vanderbilt’s English faculty as an Assistant Professor in 2014. Her research and teaching interests include transnational American literatures, performance studies, gender studies, and Latino/a studies. She is the author of Precarious Forms: Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas (Northwestern University Press, forthcoming spring 2020), in which she argues that utopian longing in the Americas paradoxically arises from the material conditions of socioeconomic crisis. In her analysis of poems, body art, and multimedia installations that illuminate the persistence of a radical utopian imaginary in the Americas, Amich engages critical debates in performance studies, Latin American cultural studies, literature, and art history.

Amich is coeditor, with Elin Diamond and Denise Varney, of Performance, Feminism and Affect in Neoliberal Times (Palgrave, 2017). The volume represents the cross-cultural and collaborative research advanced by the Feminist Research Working Group of the International Federation of Theatre Research. The book examines feminist performative acts that contest the unravelling of collectively won gains in gender, sexual, and racial equality across multiple sites including Asia, Australia, Canada, Europe, Latin America and the United States.

Amich is a 2019-2020 Robert Penn Warren “Borders and Belonging” Faculty Fellow. She is currently at work on her second book project Planetary Cuba, in which she examines corporeal, textual, and visual performances that pose planetary – that is, simultaneously site-specific and global – solutions to the island’s post-Soviet economic crisis and neoliberal transformation.    

Professor Amich’s regular undergraduate course offerings include: ENGL 2200 The Foundations of Literary Study; ENGL 3650 Ethnic American Literature; ENGL 3742 Feminist Theory; and LATS 2201 Introduction to Latino Studies.