Mel Y. Chen is Associate Professor of Gender & Women's Studies and Director for the  Center for the Study of Sexual Culture at the University of California, Berkeley. Their 012 book, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Duke UP, MLA Alan Bray Award), explores questions of racialization, queering, disability, and affective  economies in animate and inanimate “life” through the extended concept of animacy.  Chen’s current book project concerns relationships among the conceptual territories of toxicity and intoxication and related histories of the shared interanimation of race  and disability. Elsewhere, Chen writes on slowness, gesture, inhumanisms, and  cognitive disability and method. Chen co-edits a book series entitled “Anima” at  Duke University Press and are part of a small and sustaining queer of color arts collective in the Bay Area.