Austin Svedjan (any pronouns) is a Doctoral Candidate and Fontaine Fellow in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where they study sexuality studies, queer theory, and 20/21st century American cultural production.

Austin’s writing appears or is forthcoming in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, ASAP/J, among others.

Along with John Paul Ricco, they are the editor of the recent special issue of Postmodern Culture on the “Afterlives of the Antisocial.” They were recently interviewed about the special issue on the podcast Gender Jawn.

Their current project traces the concept of "bad sex" across popular literary objects (e.g. sex manuals, prefaces to trans autobiographies, and feminist manifestos) in the long twentieth-century as it intersects with adjacent discourses of eugenics, aesthetic education, and sexual liberation.