Austin Svedjan is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. Their writing appears or is forthcoming in venues such as TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Postmodern Culture, among others. Their dissertation project tracks the emergence of the modern concept of “bad sex” through its historical interfacing with institutions of literary education across the long twentieth-century United States.

For the 2025–2026 academic year, Austin is a Doctoral Fellow at the Wolf Humanities Center, where they are working on a project interrogating discourses surrounding the “truth” of medical gender transition as it is represented in the work of both twentieth-century sexology and contemporary trans studies. Their archival attentions for this project focalize around autobiographies written by trans people and prefaced by sexologists in order to experiment with how the concept of “paratext” might offer a new tool for better understanding the historical development of trans subjectivity.