Tompkins earns prestigious fellowship, national recognition for groundbreaking book

UB faculty member Kyla Tompkins has received multiple national honors for her latest book, “Deviant Matter: Ferment, Intoxicants, Jelly, Rot” (NYU Press 2024), including a prestigious fellowship from the National Humanities Center that will support her next major research project.

“This is one of the fellowships that every humanist in the country is trying to get,” says Tompkins, professor and chair of the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies. “I’m so excited and honored to have had my project chosen for support. I’m just really glad to go the NHC and to represent the university there.”

During a fellowship year, participants make significant progress on their projects while exchanging ideas with fellow scholars and stepping away from the usual demands of daily work. During her fellowship, Tompkins will focus on her next book, which examines issues surrounding food over the past 150 years.

“It’s a book about how global tastes for food have shifted over the last century and a half as a result of war and developmental aid, food aid and empire,” Tompkins explains.

Like her previous work, this new book combines archival research with a public-facing approach.

In addition to this project, Tompkins will begin work on a second edition of “Keywords in Gender and Sexuality Studies,” a major collaborative scholarly volume for which she serves as managing editor. She also has a third book already contracted and is in talks for a fourth. In addition, she continues to executive produce a teaching podcast on feminist theory.

Tompkins has also been awarded the Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize, one of the most distinguished honors in queer and gender studies, jointly presented by the Modern Language Association and the American Studies Association. The award recognizes exceptional scholarship that advances the field in innovative and transformative ways.

In announcing the award, committee chair Anna Storti praised Tompkin’s work, noting, “There is no dearth of scholarship on the topic of deviance in queer studies and yet there is no study to date that has accomplished what “Deviant Matter” has. Taking up deviance across multiple categories — gelatinousness, fermentation, putrefaction and intoxication — and multiple scales — the microbial, intimate, every day and juridical — Tompkins thinks across materiality, aesthetics, politics and affect to examine ‘the many modes of living and creating that lie outside or direct themselves against aesthetic and political normativity.’”

The committee described “Deviant Matter” as “provocative, timely and urgent,” citing its originality of ideas and archive, as well as its sustained clarity of argument.

The book also received an honorable mention for the René Wellek Prize, a major award in comparative literature distributed by the American Comparative Literature Association; the association described the project as having an “astonishing theoretical breadth and depth.”

“To be recognized by three of the major scholarly organizations in the humanities is an honor beyond words,” Tompkins says.

Since the book’s publication in December 2024, Tompkins has delivered approximately 16 invited talks at universities across the country, with additional invitations still coming in.

For Tompkins, the most meaningful response has come from students.

“The best thing a graduate student has said to me is, ‘Your book gave me permission to do my work,’” she says. “That’s the goal — to send your work out into the world and to be the scaffolding off of which better work happens. So that’s the greatest thing in the world to me.”

She says the honorable mention for the René Wellek Prize was especially meaningful because it came from outside her primary field.

“For an organization working in global literatures to include my book and essentially say, ‘you have to read this because there are things happening in this book that are relevant to our field,’ is just the biggest honor,” she says.

“Deviant Matter” is a study of materials defined by transformation, instability and decay, and reflects more than a decade of interdisciplinary research at the intersection of food studies, gender and sexuality studies, history and critical theory.

The project began with an unexpected moment during Tompkins’ graduate studies at Stanford.

“We made a Jell-O sculpture for a department party and it went completely wrong,” she recalls. “It didn’t cohere, and the different colors ran into each other — it just went badly. We thought we’d have this amazing layered, multicolored sculpture and it ended up being the most hideous, disgusting thing you’ve ever seen.”

From that starting point, the book expands into a broader exploration of aesthetics, science, culture and power, tracing how developments such as Pasteur’s discoveries shaped everyday life in the United States and influenced governance systems that continue to affect communities differently.

“It’s partly a story about the changing shape of the federal government, including the creation and rise of the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration. It’s also a story about how the U.S. functions through science in such ways that it privileges some communities and hurt others,” she says.

Tompkins, who joined the UB faculty in fall 2023, credits the university’s research environment and her colleagues with supporting and inspiring her.

“UB has been incredibly welcoming,” she says. “I work with an exceptional community of scholars. My colleagues make me smarter, and the research support here is helping propel my next book projects. And I’m really grateful for that”

She also emphasized the extensive success of her department.

“Over the last three years, we’ve become one of the most important gender studies programs in the country. We’re producing multiple award-winning books and earning prestigious fellowships,” she says. “I’m super proud of us.”

As Tompkins prepares for her fellowship year, she hopes her work continues to empower students and emerging scholars.

“I hope students are inspired to take risks in their research and to be confident that the knowledge they’re producing is breaking new ground for the scholarship of the future,” she says.