Isaac West

Isaac West is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Vanderbilt University. Professor West's research focuses primarily on legal rhetorics and their role in constituting us as citizens of states, nations, and the world. His first book, Transforming Citizenships: Transgender Articulations of the Law (NYU Press, 2014), engages trans advocacy and activism to demonstrate how these citizenship claims can queer legal norms and conventions. Transforming Citizenships was a finalist for the...See more

Isaac West is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Vanderbilt University. Professor West's research focuses primarily on legal rhetorics and their role in constituting us as citizens of states, nations, and the world. His first book, Transforming Citizenships: Transgender Articulations of the Law (NYU Press, 2014), engages trans advocacy and activism to demonstrate how these citizenship claims can queer legal norms and conventions. Transforming Citizenships was a finalist for the 2014 Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies. Professor West has also written related essays about centrality of gender and sexuality to our understanding of citizenship, including how bakers have employed religious freedom as a justification for not treating everyone equally, the ethics and appropriateness of employing "like race" analogies in queer advocacy, and how coming out narratives are produced and mean different things to different audiences. See less