My name is Jo Michael Rezes (/rez/•/iz/, Hungarian pronunciation: rɛzɛʃ), a researcher who completed an auto-ethnographical MA thesis titled "Phantacamp: Queer Temporal Ruptures in the Performance of Restaged Camp" which inspired my teaching on aesthetics of humor & contemporary performance. At Tufts, I have instructed Introduction to Acting and Public Speaking, and original courses Devised Performance: Creativity in Crisis and Camp and Popular Media. I have taught Introduction to Theatre at Boston College and Gender Inclusive Pedagogy and Disability Justice for Theatre Education in Emerson College's Applied Theatre & Theatre Education program.

My completed dissertation project,  and monograph-in-process, "Tastes Like AIDS: Sweet Aesthetics, Bitter Humor, and Viral Performances of HIV/AIDS" centers taste in the study of HIV/AIDS. Taste—both literal and metaphorical—structures cultural understandings of HIV/AIDS across performance, media, and food cultures. Drawing from queer studies, performance studies, affect and sensory studies, food studies, and disability studies, the project argues that HIV/AIDS has been repeatedly imagined through sensory metaphors of flavor, particularly sweetness and bitterness, which shape racialized and queerphobic discourses about contagion, intimacy, and the body. Rather than only treating taste as a descriptor of aesthetic discernment, this dissertation positions taste as an embodied practice which organizes public encounters with HIV/AIDS across archival ephemera—from social media to film and television, theatre, installation art, ‘zines, legal records, and culinary practices. The project begins by tracing the contemporary slang phrase “tastes like AIDS” across digital platforms, where the virus is invoked through jokes about flavor, contamination, and bodily contact. This vernacular archive reveals how phantom sensations of taste and smell reproduce colonial associations of race, sexuality, and disease. I theorize this phenomenon as cultural parosmia: a distorted sensory framework in which certain bodies—particularly Black, brown, and queer bodies—are sensed as contaminated through aesthetic perception and affected tastes from viral conditions.