Emily Hoffman (she/her) is a PhD candidate at Columbia University. Her research focuses on the state child protection apparatus in the U.S., and in Eastern Oklahoma in particular. She writes about how “child abuse” came to be an object of knowledge and state intervention starting in the 1960s, focusing on the repression of political economy, the displacement of questions of historical repair and justice by the trauma concept, racialized and classed reckonings of kinship, and the figure of the child as a figure of projection and fantasy.

She has been an Affiliate Scholar at the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and is the Curatorial and Editorial Manager of the Social Study of Disappearance Lab at Columbia. She is also a poet. She volunteers with Poetic Justice, where she writes in community with women incarcerated in Oklahoma.