Vera Mulvey

Vera earned her PhD from the University of Michigan in Sociocultural Anthropology in 2025. Her dissertation, "Thickening Discipline: An Essentialist's Guide to Strength Training in the United States" focuses on gendered athletic repetition, whiteness in the United States South, and practices of relational devotion and transformation. Utilizing multiple "passes" of analysis, her work experiments with analytic form as function while exploring paired themes of humoral contamination/enclosure, stability/pain, and disorientation/adherence. Her current writing project is a collection of short stories on transsexual movement and touch, chronic and chosen pain, and butch/femme hermeneutics. Outside the classroom, Vera is a leatherworker and motorcycle enthusiast.