- Elena Gambino
- Position:
Associate Professor of Political Science
- Bio:
Elena Gambino is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University. She works at the intersection of political theory, historiography, and feminist and queer studies. Her first book, Erotic Knowledge: Toward a Lesbian Feminist Political Theory, was published by Duke University Press in 2026. Erotic Knowledge draws on archival sources typically ignored in political theory, such as lesbian feminist poetry, literary criticism, and the publications of small presses and periodicals, and argues that these lesbian feminist contributions should be seen as a distinctive and transformative form of political analysis. Her work has been recognized with several research awards, including and most recently the 2025 Polity Best Paper Award for her article “Research as ‘Waystation’ in the Midcentury Homophile Movement.” Her article “Red Roots of Solidarity: Paula Gunn Allen and the Queer Audiences of Intellectual Sovereignty” was a co-winner of the 2023 Okin-Young Award in Feminist Political Theory, and “Politics as Sinister Wisdom: Reparation and Responsibility in Lesbian Feminism” was the recipient of the Women & Politics Best Paper Award in 2020. Elena is currently working on two new book-length projects: Precedential Death, which thematizes the non-standing of certain subjects to appear in legal narratives for which they nonetheless play central and defining roles, and The Heterosexual Grotesque, which asks how the necropolitics of contemporary heterosexual figures like the blackpiller, the tradwife, and the femboy re-structure the public’s desire for a future.
