Beenash Jafri is an assistant professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at UC Davis. Her work interrogates the fraught intersections of race, Indigeneity, settler colonialism, and sexuality through film and cultural criticism. Her current book project engages relational frameworks to investigate the seemingly contradictory attachments of Asian diasporas to settler colonialism, and examines the models Asian diasporic filmmakers offer to work through these. Her writing has been published in venues such as GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Settler Colonial Studies, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Cultural Studies-Critical Methodologies, and Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association. She is the book reviews co-editor for Lateral. 

Her broad areas of interest include critical race and ethnic studies; relational theory and critique; settler colonialism and decolonization; queer studies (esp queer of color critique); Black, Indigenous, and women of color feminisms; diasporic film and media; and representations of structural violence. She earned her PhD in Gender, Feminist and Women's Studies at York University (Toronto).