Dr Billy Holzberg

Billy Holzberg is a Lecturer/Assistant Professor in Social Justice. His research, teaching and public engagement draw on transnational, liberatory, and collaborative queer feminist approaches.

Prior to joining King's College London, he was a Fellow in Gender and Sexuality at the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics, where he also completed his PhD in the Department of Gender Studies.

Research

Billy is broadly interested in the sexual and affective life of power. His research grapples with the role that sexual desire and emotional attachments play in fuelling social inequalities, nationalisms, and neo-fascist politics today and how such dynamics might be counteracted. In exploring these questions, he draws on and contributes to work in queer studies, transnational feminism, affect theory, postcolonial critique, and critical migration and border studies. His work is informed by cultural, visual, and media analysis and he is interested in bridging innovative methodologies and reading practices between the humanities and the social sciences.

His first monograph Affective Bordering: The Emotional Politics of Race, Migration, and Deservingness (Manchester University Press) explores the interplay between affect and migration control, revealing how emotions work to reinforce racial and national hierarchies. Taking the construction of migration as crisis in Germany as its case study, the book brings together queer feminist theories of affect with postcolonial border studies offering an incisive perspective on the reproduction and contestation of borders in today’s world.

He is working on two other projects, both of which are collaborative in nature. The first project, developed with Aiko Holvikivi and Tomás Ojeda, focuses on current attacks on ‘gender’ and so-called ‘gender ideology’. This work has culminated in the edited volume Transnational Anti-Gender Politics: Feminist Solidarity in Times of Global Attacks (Palgrave) which brings together interventions from various geopolitical locations examining anti-gender politics in relation to coloniality, racial capitalism, and rising authoritarianism across the globe.

The second project focuses on contemporary cultural negotiations of sex. This work charts the move to representations of ‘bad’ – awkward, shameful, and non-normative – sex in popular culture and he has recently started work on the manuscript Bad Sex: Affect, Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary TV (Bloomsbury) co-written with Jacqueline Gibbs and Aura Lehtonen.

Billy's work is insistently interdisciplinary and has appeared in journals like Body and Society, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Feminist Media Studies, International Affairs, and Sociology. He is on the editorial board of the Sociological Review, sits on the steering committee of Queer@King’s, and has been a visiting scholar at Columbia University in New York City and at the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil.

Teaching

Billy is deputy programme lead for the BA in Social Sciences where he currently convenes modules on ‘The Everyday Politics of Gender and Sexuality’, ‘Media, Culture and Society’ and ‘Civil and Political Rights’.

PhD Supervision

Billy is happy to supervise and support PhD projects on queer theory; transnational feminism; migration, border, and nationalism; the study of affect and emotion; and/or cultural and media analysis. 

He looks forward to receiving proposals for the PhD in Interdisciplinary Policy Studies.