Kalle Westerling

Kalle Westerling is a Digital Humanities Research Software Engineer with the British Library and the Turing Institute, in the Living with Machines research project. He holds a Ph.D. in Theatre and Performance from The Graduate Center, CUNY. His doctoral research focused on itinerant drag performers around New York and along the Eastern Seaboard in the 1930s as part of a collective art form that brought queerness with them to towns and cities around the area. He has also written on topics ranging from queer indie wrestlers, boylesque and male-identified strippers in neo-burlesque, and the influence of RuPaul’s Drag Race on the livelihood and aesthetics of contemporary New York City drag queens.