Timothy Pantoja

Bio

Timothy Pantoja is the Mellon Fellow of the Humanities at Stanford University and a Lecturer in the Department of African and African American Studies. Prior to coming to Stanford, he was the Medical Humanities Fellow at New York University where he taught courses on the ways the humanities rethinks ideas and practices of healing, recovery, and wholeness. His research explores the ways Black and Caribbean literature and art theorize reflection, doubt, and what it means to participate with the objects that mediate our encounters with each other and a shareable world. His current book project, Scenes of Reflection: Compelling Insinuations, Empathy, and Absorption, analyzes portrayals of reflection in black modernist art and literature alongside the aesthetic evolutions of empathy as a mode of perception. This book reveals how artists such as Henry Tanner, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Claude McKay engaged contemporary aesthetic theories on empathy as kinesthesia and synesthesia to show the ways reflection is an act of relation and participation. The aim of this project is to show resonances and connections between these portrayals of reflection during the black modernist period with current aesthetic theories on haptic and synesthetic modes of beholding and reading in Black studies. He also holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School which generated writings on the relation between literature and religion. His engagement with religion and art is leading to a second project, entitled, Yet Do I Marvel: Doubt, Curiosity, and Adolescence, which analyzes the ways African American and Caribbean literature, visual art, and film depict doubt as a catalyst for creativity and critique, opening new spaces to (re)consider the fraught intersections between Black religion and artistic expression.

Academic Appointments

• Lecturer, African and African American Studies