Jenny James is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia. Her academic interests include twentieth-century North American literature, feminist and queer theory, memory studies, and American culture. Her dissertation is tentatively entitled: “Intimating Affiliative Futures: Questioning Genealogy and Identity in the Post-1960 American Novel,” and will explore the concomitant representation of reproductive genealogies and political identity at work in novels from the 1960s until today. In attempting to explore the figuration of intimacy as a way to find commonality between authors such as Tim O’Brien, Margaret Atwood, Philip Roth and James Baldwin, this project negotiates competing collective memories of the 1960s.