S. Trimble
Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, Women & Gender Studies Institute
S. Trimble is an Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, in the Women & Gender Studies Institute (WGSI).
In her research, Trimble explores the world-making force of storytelling and how particular forms and genres metabolize their historical moment, how these imaginings speak to us as subjects and how they might be put to work in the building of a more just world. She focuses on the grim genres — gothic, horror, apocalypse and dystopia — which she analyzes through the lenses of feminist cultural studies, Black feminist thought and queer theory.
Trimble earned her PhD in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in 2012. She has taught courses in feminist cultural studies at the WGSI, where she currently serves as Undergraduate Chair.
Her first book, Undead Ends: Stories of Apocalypse (Rutgers 2019), examines how the centering of white masculinity in mainstream apocalypse films constrains how we imagine human survival. The book also “hacks” these stories, highlighting the more radical futures that simmer beneath their surface. This dual approach to popular culture informs her teaching, in which monsters and haunted houses are entry points into discussions of history, capitalism, ideology and identity. For this work, she received a Superior Teaching Award from the Faculty of Arts & Science.
As a writing fellow with Bitch Media, she wrote about conspiracy theory, pronoun practices, queer representation in the 1990s and other topics.