Education
BA Feminist Studies; Latin American & Latino Studies; Politics
University of California, Santa Cruz
MA Gender & Women’s Studies
The University of Arizona
PhD Gender & Women’s Studies
The University of Arizona
Research
Dr. Adrián I. P-Flores is the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Comparative Literature. Under the postdoctoral faculty mentorship of Professor Eleanor Kaufman, Flores will develop his doctoral dissertation on the political ontology of suicide into a book manuscript, “What is Suicide? Entanglements of Philosophy and Literature in the ‘Afterlife of Slavery.’” This project traces the transformation of the concept of suicide between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries to examine its intersection with the histories and geographies of colonial dispossession and racial slavery. Rather than belaboring the leading question of suicide causation that structures the suicidological imagination and the biopolitics of suicide prevention, “What is Suicide?” poses the problem of suicide as a fundamental question about the racialization of human freedom. His broader research is guided by the imperative that a structural critique of antiblackness must precede all critiques of the grammars of suffering that overdetermine prevailing representations of suicide.
During his fellowship, Flores will conduct archival research on the founder of suicidology, Dr. Edwin S. Shneidman, whose notes on the development of the “psychological autopsy”—the dominant method for determining suicide causation—are housed in the UCLA Library Special Collections. Over the coming year, he also plans to extend his research into the critique of “Black suicide” in the field of radical Black psychiatry with a focus on the writings of the psychologist Bobby E. Wright and the psychoanalysts Charles Prudhomme and Frantz Fanon.