Karl Surkan (1970-2023)

Remembering tD writer Karl Surkan 

Karl Surkan was  an educator, performing arts critic, cellist, cultural theorist, and freelance writer, based in Northwest Philadelphia and Boston. He had a Ph.D. in English with a Feminist Studies minor from the University of Minnesota and taught primarily in gender and sexuality studies for  20 years in a variety of locations, including MIT, Tufts, UMass-Boston, Temple, and Swarthmore. His dance writing experience began in the 1990s in the Twin Cities cabaret scene, fostering a life-long appreciation of dance, experimental theater, and drag performance. His non-academic writing has been published in Newsworks, Patch, Pulse, The Minnesota Daily A&E (where he also worked as an associate arts editor), Focus Point, Lavender, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and mnartists.org. Academic publications include a dissertation on passing rhetorics and the performativity of gender identity, essays in The Drag King Anthology and Stieg Larsson and Philosophy, and more recently several auto-ethnographic pieces exploring intersections between trans identity, health care, and reproductive technologies.