Graduate Students & Fellows
Julia Kowalski
CSGS Fellow, PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Human Development, Anthropology
Kowalski's dissertation focuses on how social activists, bureaucrats, and professional family counselors draw upon discourses of transformation and continuity as they attempt to regulate the relationship between women and their families in Jaipur, the capital of the northwestern Indian state of Rajasthan. In particular, her work explores how these attempts shape and are shaped by local understandings of the connection between care, violence, and social transformation. More broadly, Kowalski is interested in the anthropology of gender, kinship and the family in South Asia and beyond, as well as the ethnography of clinical and institutional sites. She holds a BA and MA from the University of Chicago.
Michael J Kozloski
CSGS Fellow, PhD candidate in the Sociology Department
Kozloski's major areas of interest lie in demography and gender/sexuality studies; under the tutelage of Dr Kristen Schilt, his dissertation is titled "Assessing the Demographics of Homosexual Tolerance." He was previously a trainee at the Center on Demography & Economics of Aging at NORC, and he has done extensive research in the Family Planning Department at the University of Chicago Hospitals. He received his MS in statistics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2005 and his MA in sociology from the University of Chicago in 2007. He plans to complete his doctoral studies in the spring of 2012.
Sarah Luna
CSGS Fellow, doctoral candidate in the Anthropology department
Luna is currently writing her dissertation, "Transforming Value(s) at the Border: Missionaries and Sex Workers in a Mexican Border City." Her dissertation examines the lives and projects of differentially empowered border residents and their relationships to three industries defined by structural inequalities between the US and Mexico: prostitution, missionary work, and drug trafficking. Based upon ethnographic research in the Mexican border city of Reynosa, her research focuses upon the projects and relationships of (mostly Mexican) sex workers who migrate to Reynosa to work in a walled-in prostitution zone and the (mostly American) missionaries who migrate to Reynosa to build relationships with and transitional housing for sex workers. She examines how the projects, relationships and subjectivities of sex workers and missionaries are shaped by the difference created by the border and how their projects have been impacted by dialectics of local and transnational phenomena, including the sovereignty of drug cartels in Reynosa, the federal "war" against them, local police corruption, and the global economic crisis. Luna received her BA in Anthropology at The University of Texas at San Antonio in 2003 and her MA in Anthropology at the University of Chicago in 2005.
George Paul Meiu
CSGS Fellow, PhD candidate in socio-cultural anthropology
Meiu's research examines how tourist commodification of ethnicity and cultural difference shapes subjectivities and lived worlds in contemporary Kenya. By exploring various aspects of desire and sexuality, gender and age, embodiment and everyday life, money and kinship, and commodities and ritual, Meiu sets out to show how, among the Samburu of northern Kenya, people came to envision futures by marketing "culture." In his dissertation "Samburu Ethno-Erotic Economies: Difference, Desire, and Social Regeneration in Postcolonial Kenya," Meiu approaches the commodification of ethnic and cultural difference as a lens through which to reexamine theorizations of subjectivity and value. In spring 2012, Meiu will teach a course on "Gender and Sexuality in Modern Africa."
Monica Mercado
CSGS Fellow and B.A. Preceptor, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History
Mercado's work is on nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. women's history and the impact of religion on American culture. Her dissertation, "Women and the Word: Gender, Print, and Catholic Identity in Nineteenth-Century America," examines religious practices and organizational growth centered on books and reading during an era of fierce Protestant-Catholic competition. She has taught courses in U.S. history and gender studies at the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois-Chicago. Mercado has also been a part of the Center for Gender Studies for several years, serving as the Gender and Sexuality Studies workshop coordinator and curating the exhibition "On Equal Terms"—Educating Women at the University of Chicago. She holds a B.A. from Barnard College of Columbia University and an M.A. from the University of Chicago.
Hyun-Suk Park
CSGS Fellow, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Korean literature.
Park's dissertation, "Female Performers and Literati Culture of Late Choson Korea," explores the intersections between gender, performance, and literary representation in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Korea. During the next academic year, she will be writing on the performances by courtesans at the royal palace and at the borderland between Korea and China.
Larisa Reznik
Gender and Sexuality Studies Workshop Coordinator, doctoral candidate in theology concentrating on religious thought in the modern West.
Reznik's research interests include an interrogation of appeals to theological grammar in twentieth-century political and social thought, questions of religious subjectivity and materiality, and gender and feminist studies in religion. Her dissertation examines the relationship between theology and politics in the work of Franz Rosenzweig and Theodor W. Adorno and utilizes a variety of interdisciplinary tools, including feminist theory, to do so. She earned a B.A. in both English Literature and Religion from Bowdoin College and an M.A. from the University of Chicago Divinity School.
Caroline Schuster
CSGS Fellow and Gender and Sexuality Studies Workshop Coordinator, PhD candidate in the Socio-Cultural Anthropology
Schuster's work examines the relationships among inequality, economic policy, and financial instruments through the lens of microcredit-based development projects: in particular, on these as small group-based loans collateralized through joint liability, wherein loans are secured by no more than the mutual guarantee of a group. Microcredit-which relies on "social" rather than physical collateral-is an especially fruitful site for examining interdependency as a mode of sociality. Through 18 months of fieldwork in Paraguay, Schuster examined gender and urban settlement patterns as key markers of difference that accrete along lines of social and economic inequality, and also joint economic obligation, both of which condition and are reproduced by microcredit development loans. She is completing a dissertation entitled, "Living on Credit: microfinance development NGOs and the regulation of joint obligation in Paraguay's tri-border area."