Laura Coby (she/her)

Laura M. Coby is PhD candidate in Literary Studies with a minor in Queer Studies. Her research focuses on modern to contemporary performance with a concentration in performance studies, queer of color and feminist critique, & minoritarian aesthetics. Traversing drama, film, and contemporary art, her dissertation, “Spectral Futurity: The Performative Afterlives of Mourning,” explores how aesthetic mourning practices pave avenues for the dead to inhabit the present, refusing death's finitude through aesthetic relational exchange. In past years, Laura’s writing on Felix Gonzalez-Torres was awarded with the Humanities Research Institute Prize for Graduate Research in the Humanities. 

In Spring 2023, Laura was the Sue Divan Graduate Student Fellow in Performance Studies and directed a staged reading of Fefu and Her Friends by playwright María Irene Fornés, produced by Prof. Sandra Ruiz through La Estación Gallery and Minor Aesthetics Lab. In recent years, Laura has worked with La Estación Gallery to perform as a contributing poet, intern, collaborative curator, multi-sensorial installation art, workshop leader, virtual stage manager, and social media designer. She also did dramaturgical work for The Brown Theatre Collective's production of Fornés's The Successful Life of 3. 

In previous years, she has served as an Assistant Director of Rhetoric, the Round-the-Press Intern at the University of Illinois Press, and as a research assistant for Prof. Sandra Ruiz and Prof. Andrew Gaedtke. She has also served as the graduate representative to the English Advisory Committee and Rhetoric Advisory Committee.