Jaime Coan

Jaime Shearn Coan’s research attends to corporeal archives—in particular, to the circulation of embodied knowledge related to race, nation, gender, sexuality, and seropositivity. From 2020–22, Shearn Coan was the Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow at ONE Archives Foundation in Los Angeles. Shearn Coan received his PhD in English from The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). His dissertation, “Corporeal Archives of HIV/AIDS: The Performance of Relation,” was supported by a 2019–20 CUNY Dissertation Fellowship at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (NYPL). 

Shearn Coan’s writing has appeared in publications including ASAP Journal, TDR: The Drama Review, Critical Correspondence, The Brooklyn Rail, Movement Research Performance Journal, Gulf Coast, On Curating, and Women & Performance. He is the co-editor with Ishmael Houston Jones and Will Rawls, of Lost and Found: Dance, New York, HIV/AIDS, Then and Now (Danspace Project 2016) and, with Tara Aisha Willis, of Marking the Occasion (Wendy’s Subway, 2020). His poetry chapbook, Turn it Over, was published in 2015 by Argos Books. He is currently at work on a monograph on the performance works of Assotto Saint, and recently authored the introduction to Sacred Spells: Collected Works of Assotto Saint (Nightboat Books 2023). He is also co-author with Tara Aisha Willis and taisha paggett of In the Horizontal Plane: taisha paggett Performance Works, forthcoming from Soberscove Press in 2024.