THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Center Staff and Leadership
Faculty Director
she/her/hers
heatherk@uchicago.edu
Heather Keenleyside is an associate professor of English and an affiliate faculty member of CSGS. She regularly teaches in the core sequence, Gender and Sexuality in World Civilizations, as well as both graduate and undergraduate courses cross-listed in Gender and Sexuality Studies, including Girlhood, Women and Enlightenment, and British Women Writers. Outside of gender and sexuality studies, her teaching and research interests center on eighteenth-century literature (including the novel, poetry, philosophy, natural history, and children’s literature), as well as on animal studies, intellectual history, and the history of criticism.
Contact Heather with any questions about CSGS, or if you’re interested in getting more involved with the Center.
Associate Director
she/her/hers
tbrazas@uchicago.edu
773-795-6503
Tate has provided administrative, financial, operational and programming support to the Center since 2014. She completed graduate work in Sexuality Studies at San Francisco State University where her research focused on internet-based organizing and identity building among pregnant and parenting youth. She also received a BA with Honors from the University of California, Santa Cruz where she majored in Community Studies with an emphasis on feminist organizing. Tate has developed and co-instructed both a graduate seminar course at San Francisco State University ("Queer, Feminist, and Sociological: A Readings Course") and an undergraduate seminar course at the University of California, Santa Cruz ("Youth & Sexual Politics"). At the University, Tate also serves as a Resident Head in Housing and Residence Life. Both at the Center and in Housing, Tate loves curating thematic snacks. For leisure, Tate enjoys vegan baking, swimming in the lake, dancing for fun, and spending time with her exceptionally sweet dog, Bee.
Contact Tate with administrative, operational, and programming questions related to the CSGS.
Director for Research and Programming
she/her/hers
kparsard@uchicago.edu
Kaneesha Cherelle Parsard is an assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago. Her research concerns gender and sexuality amid the legacies of slavery and emancipation in the Caribbean and broader Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. She is the author of Desiring Freedom: Counter-Imaginaries of Work, Sex, and Family after West Indian Emancipation (forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press, November 2026).
Contact Kaneesha with ideas about programming, or research initiatives and opportunities, or with questions about CSGS support for faculty research or events.
Assistant Director for Student Affairs and Curriculum
she/her/hers
bonniek@uchicago.edu
773-702-2365
Bonnie Kanter joined the CSGS staff in August 2018. She is primarily responsible for advising undergraduate majors/minors, crosslisting courses, coordinating student programming and running all of the various fellowship and awards selection processes. Prior to joining the CSGS staff, Bonnie worked for 15 years as an Adviser in the College. During that time she ran a program for Chicago Public School students who took coursework at UChicago and was one of the founding staff members of the Center for College Student Success, a program designed to support FLI (first-generation and/or low-income) students. Bonnie has a Master’s in Education with a minor in Women’s Studies from Oregon State University (her favorite paper was on the period in the 1920s when advertising images of women became sexualized). Bonnie also has a BS in Journalism from the University of Illinois. Outside of work, Bonnie spends way too much time thinking about/cooking/traveling for food. She's eaten at over 900 restaurants in Chicago – feel free to ask for recommendations!
Contact Bonnie with undergraduate advising questions for Gender and Sexuality Studies.
Director of Studies
he/him/his
gwinant@uchicago.edu
Gabriel Winant is an Associate Professor of History and the College and a historian of labor, political economy, capitalism, and the welfare state. The core of his research program is to interrogate changing forms of social class in modern societies. He studies how economic production shapes the composition of classes and the formation of state institutions; and how this shaping is mediated by the articulations of race, gender, sexuality, and disability.
Contact Gabriel with questions about the major, minor, or other curricular questions.
Chair of Gender and Sexuality in World Cultures core sequence
she/her/hers
sjzhang@uchicago.edu
SJ Zhang is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Chicago. Their current project, Going Maroon and Other Forms of Family, considers how reproduction and carceral forces shaped the decisions and triggered the archives of four women who went maroon in North America and the Caribbean between 1781 and 1820. She is also working on a project concerning “Tituba, the Indian,” in which she examines Tituba’s testimony and subsequent representations through a lens of North American bondage and the historical carceral state. She teaches transnational literary histories of slave and maroon narratives, constructions of gender, race and forms of bondage before 1850, and courses on the work of Toni Morrison and archival theory and method. Her work is published in the History of the Present, William & Mary Quarterly, Small Axe, Representations, and Women & Performance.
Contact SJ with questions about the GNSE Civ sequence.
Faculty Advisor, Graduate Certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies
Instructional Professor in Gender and Sexuality Studies
he/him/his
redtremm@uchicago.edu
Professor Tremmel is an interdisciplinary historian whose scholarly and artistic work focuses on the role of pleasure and play in the lives of marginalized people. His work analyzes the practices and conditions that enable queer epistemologies and supple world-building strategies. As a documentary filmmaker and installation artist, Tremmel directed and co-produced the documentary film Exotic World and the Burlesque Revival (2012) and co-created Subjects of Desire: Objects of Resistance, a multimedia installation commissioned for dOCUMENTA(13). His most recent publication appeared in the anthology Understanding and Teaching U.S. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender History (University of Wisconsin Press), which won a Lambda Literary Award. Tremmel earned his Ph.D. in History at the University of Chicago.
Contact Red with any questions about the graduate certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies.
Board of Directors
Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity
Computer Science and Data Science
Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice
English Language and Literature, CSGS Associate Member
English Language and Literature; Faculty Director
English Language and Literature; Director for Research and Programming
Family Medicine
Anthropology
Gender and Sexuality Studies
MAPSS
History; Director of Studies