Christine Goding-Doty is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Previously, she was an A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow with the Center for the Humanities and the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. There she was a member of the 2018-2020 cohort of Mellon Fellows convened around the theme "Truth, Fact, and Ways of Knowing." Dr. Goding-Doty received her PhD in African American Studies from Northwestern University in 2018. In the course of her study she also spent three years in cotutelle at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.

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The dominant questions of Dr. Goding-Doty's research consider what new problems and avenues of thought the digital age and social media open up for the study of race, whiteness, and coloniality. In "Virtually White: The Crisis of Whiteness, Racial Rule, and Affect in the Digital Age," Goding-Doty identifies a crisis of white hegemony that has taken shape in the digital age, in which a broad insistence on white racial victimization has been incorporated as a strategy in white supremacist and nationalist activity. To account for the ways this paradoxical position actually constitutes a crisis in the structure of racial power, her project argues for a theoretical framework that emphasizes the virtuality of race and the affective modes of its proliferation. Using affect theory, her analysis details the ways race operates nonrepresentationally. Her project then applies this reading of race to several viral events, memes, and digital performances, both staged and spontaneous to examine the virtual processes through which race is reproduced in the era of the internet. The performances and popular cultural materials that constitute Goding-Doty's social media and internet archive not only demonstrate where whiteness is grappling with the terms of Western racial hegemony, but reveal the modes through which racial governance is adapting in the wake of social mediatization.