Adrian I. P-Flores
Visiting Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies Loyola Marymount University
Biography
Dr. Adrián I. P-Flores earned his PhD in Gender & Women’s Studies, with a concentration in Critical Geographies and Social Theory, from the University of Arizona. His research explores the psychic life of race through the analytic of the suicidal mind, treating suicide as a racial apparatus that shapes and fractures personhood, vulnerability, and consciousness in Western thought. Drawing on psychoanalysis, Black studies, and the literary and medical humanities, his work engages suicide not as pathology but as a racialized discourse of exclusion.
Dr. P-Flores completed two postdoctoral fellowships: as a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Comparative Literature at UCLA and as an ACLS Emerging Voices Fellow at UC Santa Barbara’s Walter H. Capps Center. At UCLA, his archival research on suicidology’s racial and literary foundations focused on Edwin Shneidman’s “psychological autopsy” and its debts to Melville’s "Moby-Dick." This work informed his book manuscript, "What Is Suicide? Entanglements of Philosophy and Literature in the 'Afterlife of Slavery,'" which reconceives suicide as an axiomatic term suturing Western notions of the human through antiblack violence.
At UCLA’s Health Equity & Access Research & Treatment (HEART) Lab, he collaborated with psychologists and psychiatrists to study Black children’s suicide as a form of racial violence. Their research, supported by a UCLA Initiative to Study Hate grant, exposed biases in clinical training materials and led to the development of a co-edited volume, "Vanquished Shadows."
His writing appears in "The Comparatist" and "Psychoanalysis and History," with new articles in development. His second book project, "Silent Purgatory," examines boredom, silence, and racial desubjectivation across literature and film. Across his research and pedagogy, Dr. P-Flores brings a method attuned to the racial unconscious, the aesthetic trace, and the ontological stakes of psychic life.
Dr. P-Flores completed two postdoctoral fellowships: as a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Comparative Literature at UCLA and as an ACLS Emerging Voices Fellow at UC Santa Barbara’s Walter H. Capps Center. At UCLA, his archival research on suicidology’s racial and literary foundations focused on Edwin Shneidman’s “psychological autopsy” and its debts to Melville’s "Moby-Dick." This work informed his book manuscript, "What Is Suicide? Entanglements of Philosophy and Literature in the 'Afterlife of Slavery,'" which reconceives suicide as an axiomatic term suturing Western notions of the human through antiblack violence.
At UCLA’s Health Equity & Access Research & Treatment (HEART) Lab, he collaborated with psychologists and psychiatrists to study Black children’s suicide as a form of racial violence. Their research, supported by a UCLA Initiative to Study Hate grant, exposed biases in clinical training materials and led to the development of a co-edited volume, "Vanquished Shadows."
His writing appears in "The Comparatist" and "Psychoanalysis and History," with new articles in development. His second book project, "Silent Purgatory," examines boredom, silence, and racial desubjectivation across literature and film. Across his research and pedagogy, Dr. P-Flores brings a method attuned to the racial unconscious, the aesthetic trace, and the ontological stakes of psychic life.
Education
The University of Arizona
PhD
Gender and Women's Studies
Areas of Expertise
Philosophy and Literature
Race Gender and Sexuality
Psychoanalysis
