Dr. Jacob R. Lau is a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Film and Media Studies working with Professor Fatimah Tobing Rony. His work theorizes transgender through postcolonial, queer of color, and historical materialist theorizations of time and historicism that push against and suggest alternatives to purely linear temporalities, situating trans within traditions of temporal critique, and affective histories of non-normative embodiment.
Jacob received his Ph.D. in Gender Studies from UCLA and holds a B.A. in English from UC Berkeley, as well as a M.T.S. in Women, Gender, Sexuality, and Religion from Harvard Divinity School. Along with Cameron Partridge, he is the editor of Dr. Laurence Michael Dillon/Lobzang Jivaka’s 1962 memoir Out of the Ordinary: A Life of Gender and Spiritual Transitions (Fordham University Press, 2016) for which he also co-authored an introduction. While at UCI, Jacob was interviewed by PRI’s The World for his work on Dillon/Jivaka’s memoir, which aired during January 2017.