Austin Svedjan (any pronouns) is a doctoral student and Hamilton-Law Graduate 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. They hold a BA in English from the University of Houston and an MA in English with a certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies from Louisiana State University.

Austin’s writing appears or is forthcoming in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, ASAP/J, among others. With John Paul Ricco, they are currently editing a special issue of Postmodern Culture on the “Afterlives of the Antisocial.” 

Their current project traces the concept of  "bad sex" across popular literary objects like the sex manual, the prizewinning novel, and the feminist manifesto in the long twentieth-century as it intersects with adjacent discourses of eugenics, aesthetic education, and sexual liberation. 

For the 2023-2024 academic year, Austin is one of the coordinators of the Gender and Sexuality Working Group (Gen/Sex).