Joshua Colborn

Professional Bio

Joshua Colborn is a graduate teaching assistant in English at Penn State. He previously served as a research assistant for the Digital Culture and Media Initiative and now works with the Grad Futures Initiative. His research traces hemispheric histories of power, migration, and political rupture across the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Working across literature and visual culture, he is interested in how modernity, democracy, and “peace” are produced not only through institutions and ideology, but through the forms and textures of everyday life. His work focuses on the afterlives of conflict—moments when older political worlds become illegible, yet continue to survive as residue, memory, and fugitive social possibility within documentary, realist, and popular forms.