Professor Alyosxa Tudor

Alyosxa Tudor is Professor of Gender Theory at the Department of Gender Studies at SOAS University of London.  

Professor Tudor’s work connects trans and queer feminist approaches with transnational feminism and postcolonial studies. Their research is interdisciplinary but most closely related to media and cultural studies and social and political theory. They have published widely and given international keynotes and numerous national and international papers. For their article ‘Im/Possibilities of Refusing and Choosing Gender’, they won the 2019 Feminist Theory Essay Prize. 

Alyosxa has made paradigmatic interventions into critical migration studies, critical race theory, trans studies and memory studies:  

Racism in anti-gender and anti-trans mobilisations – reconceptualising anti-trans feminism and anti-gender as transnational formations shaped by colonial histories and racist continuities rather than exclusively by assumptions about monolithic sex and gender. 

Rethinking the transnational in relation to the rise of the global right – advancing methodological and theoretical approaches that challenge Eurocentric and nationalist models of political analysis, emphasising the importance of anti-nationalism for transnational theories, investigating the role of liberalism and the left in growing fascism. 

Migratism and migratisation – a conceptual framework and terminology coined in several articles and a monograph since 2010. Alyosxa identifies migratisation – the ascription of migration – as a political logic structuring nationalism, race, and belonging in the West and transnationally. They propose a turn towards thinking migration through race and decolonial approaches. 

Alyosxa’s new monograph The Endurance of the Mare, published with Cornell University Press, unravels the complex and layered histories of belonging and non-belonging that emerge from family archives shaped by classed, sexual, state, and border violence. It asks: How might retelling the past enable a radical transformation of the present? How do we grapple with the enduring legacies of systemic violence and intergenerational trauma without reenacting wounded attachments that justify nationalisms and further violence? 

The book follows Pena, born in 1911 in the Budjak (then Russian Empire, now Ukraine), who in the 1930s travelled as a seasonal migrant worker to the Dobruja (Romania) and was forced to stay. Alyosxa Tudor traces Pena's life to examine how the trauma of migration, hunger, sexual violence, and heterosexual kinship travels across generations and national space. Mobilizing auto-theory, speculative fiction, and historical materialist analysis, Tudor proposes a paradigmatic intervention into transnational histories, memory discourse, and political responsibility. The book connects struggles from Eastern Europe to Palestine across feminist, queer, trans, and anti-racist movements. It rejects claims to epistemic innocence rooted in experiences of past violence and instead envisions different ways to politicize the present. 

At the Department for Gender Studies, Professor Tudor convenes the modules ‘Queering Migrations and Diasporas’ and ‘Transnationalising Queer, Trans and Disability Studies’ and the Gender Studies methodology module. Alyosxa’s teaching enables students to critically engage with knowledge productions from Western contexts and the Global South alike and to question Eurocentrism/US-centrism in the fields of transgender, queer, migration, critical race and disability studies. Their teaching introduces to cultural studies and political theory approaches and engages students actively in methodological questions, including how to deal with difficult/shocking content, spectatorship, language use and questions of access/non-access to visual/audio material etc. In 2018, Alyosxa won the SOAS Director’s Teaching Prize in the category ‘Innovative Teaching’. 

• Trans, queer and feminist theory  
• Transnational and decolonial feminism  
• Critical migration studies and migratisation  
• Critical race theory and racialisation  
• Queer and trans migration and diasporas  
• Resisting anti-gender and anti-trans mobilisations 
• The left and liberalism in growing fascism 
• Histories of fascism; histories of racism 
• Memory, kinship and intergenerational trauma  
• Postcolonial studies, decolonial theory and anti/nationalism 
• Critical Eastern European studies 

Professor Tudor welcomes PhD applications in the above fields.