Sylvie Thode

Biography: 

I am a PhD candidate in English at UC Berkeley, where I also serve as Program Associate for the Townsend Center for the Humanities and Assistant Editor for the journal Critical Times. For the 2026–2027 academic year, my research is supported by a Townsend Dissertation Fellowship and a Graduate Scholarship Award from the Phi Beta Kappa Northern California Association. 

Current Research: 

Most generally, my research addresses the psychic and social costs of making sexuality into a basis for solidaristic political action. In my dissertation, Alone Song: AIDS and the Edge of Solidarity, I take up this question by turning to an archive of reactionary lyric poets, bitter literary critics, outed public intellectuals, and other cultural figures who felt themselves at odds with the collectivism of AIDS activist movements. In doing so, I offer a version of AIDS history that makes central the limit cases of queer theory’s normative solidarity with figures of its past in order to explicate the implicit terms of that solidarity. 

In addition to queer theory and HIV/AIDS history -- the subjects of my dissertation -- my research interests include lyric theory, Oscar Wilde, Northern Irish poetry, and mysticism. 

Selected Publications

"Oscar Wilde's Poetics of Exposure," Modern Language Quarterly 87, no. 4 (forthcoming 2026)

"Review: Joy of the Worm," Chicago Review, June 2023.

"Form Unformed: Elizabeth Siddall's Poetics of Decreation," Victorian Poetry 59, no. 4 (2022): 452-472.

Uncertain Intimacies,” Cambridge Literary Review 13, June 2021.