Liza Blake

Liza Blake is Associate Professor of English, with research interests in early modern literature, the histories of philosophy and science, and asexuality studies. With two U of T students, she founded the online Asexuality and Aromanticism Bibliography, a resource with tagged bibliography entries meant to help scholars find relevant writing on the topics of asexuality and aromanticism studies. She has published on “Teaching Premodern Asexualities and Aromanticisms” in The Sundial and is co-editing (with Catherine Clifford and Aley O’Mara) a collection called Early Modern Asexualities. While at the QTRL, she will be bringing the edited collection to completion, updating the online Bibliography, and beginning work on a new monograph entitled “I want not love”: The Asexuality and Aromanticism of Early Modern Love Poetry. The book argues that though the modern trend is to read Renaissance love poetry as erotic and saturated with desire, it is in this body of work that we can find some of the clearest first-person assertions of never having experienced attraction or desire, so that we might label this poetry as one of our earliest “asexual archives.” But it also argues we cannot embrace these early forms of ace and aro representation without critically analyzing the misogyny, racism, and ableism that that “asexuality” includes. Through careful close reading and in conversation with modern theory, the book will dissect early modern love poetry, tracing the long afterlife of this poetry in the ways we talk about, theorize, and normalize sexual desire and romantic attraction today.