Chase Emrys (he/him/his)

Chase Emrys is a newly-minted PhD and currently serves as Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Germanics. He came to UW in 2014 after finishing his Master’s program at the University of Kentucky, where he taught undergraduate German for two years. Chase was the recipient of a Max Kade Fellowship during his first year at the University of Washington, as well as a Go-Map Fellowship for the 2018-2019 academic year, affording him the opportunity to focus more intensely on completing his dissertation project.

His dissertation, "Subverting the Gazhe Gaze: Reclaiming Roma Identity in the European World and Beyond", explores the creation and ascription of tropic markers used to identify Roma figures in the European literary canon as a means of silencing and speaking for the marginalized, the societal underpinnings of this aggressive Othering, and the strategies by which Roma have employed and subverted these ascriptions as a means of navigating a social sphere designed to keep them from agency and self-identification. This examination of power, identity, and minority voices speaks to Chase’s broader fields of interest, which include Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, Identity Formation and Representation, and Postcolonial Studies.