Kendall Dinniene
Scholar of 20th and 21st century multi-ethnic US literature and film with a focus on race, health, gender, and embodiment.
Research
Kendall Dinniene received their Ph.D. in English from Southern Methodist University in 2025.
Kendall’s current book project, Fat Fictions: Racializing Narratives of Fatness in American Literature and Culture, mobilizes Black feminist theory to offer a social model of fatness that reveals how tropes of bodily excess are inherently entangled with and productive of ideas about race.
Their second book project, Black Fat Feminisms, uses archival research to argue that late twentieth-century Black feminist authors and activists articulated an intersectional fat politics with the potential to shape interdisciplinary scholarship and political activism today.
Kendall’s research has appeared or is forthcoming in venues including Studies in American Fiction, Ethnic Studies Review, and Fat Studies.
Publications
Published and forthcoming research, reviews, and public-facing writing
Peer-Reviewed Articles and Book Chapters
“‘On being fat’: Toward a Black Fat Feminist Politics of Limitlessness,” accepted for publication in Experiments in Black Feminism, eds. Jennifer C. Nash and Mishana Garschi.
“Wounding the Heteropatriarchy: Queer and Disabled Histories in Forgetting the Alamo and Caballero,” forthcoming in Studies in American Fiction.
“‘A Sensual People, and Doomed’: Anti-Fatness and/as Anti-Mexican Racism in America’s First Mass Medium,” Ethnic Studies Review, vol. 47, no. 2-3, 2024,
pp. 3–20.
“‘My Heart’s Fine as Long as My Stomach’s Not Empty’: Patriarchal Violence, Women’s Excess, and Fat Liberation in Criminally Insane,” Fat Studies, vol. 13, no. 1, 2024, pp. 22-35.
Book Reviews
Review of Sami Schalk’s Black Disability Politics, The Black Scholar, vol. 53, no. 3-4, 2023, pp. 133-136.
Review of E-K Daufin’s On Fat and Faith: Ending Weight Stigma in Yourself, Your Sanctuary, and Society, Excessive Bodies, vol. 1, no. 1, 2023, pp. 259-264.
Public-Facing and Creative Writing
“Neighbors,” LA Review of Books: PubLab, 2024.
“‘Eat a Salad, Sweetie‘: What Few Know About Diet and Weight,” Conceptions Review, 2021.
“Make a difference about something other than yourselves.”
Toni Morrison
Teaching
My classes emphasize inclusive teaching practices and active learning, honing students’ critical thinking, analysis, and writing skills.
Kendall Dinniene, Ph.D. 