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. 

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 him for questions about the major, minor, or other curricular questions.

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. Her first book project, An Illicit Wage: Economies of Sex and the Family after West Indian Emancipation, is an aesthetic history of hoarding, sexual labor, and hustling, as practices of freedom in the nineteenth and twentieth century British West Indies.

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. 

Lecturer in Gender and Sexuality Studies
she/her/hers

Rhiannon is a feminist theorist working in the fields of political theory and gender studies. She holds a PhD in Political Science from Northwestern University and an MA in Politics from The New School for Social Research. Her research and teaching focus primarily on intersectionality, feminist politics, critical race theory, and interpretive methods in feminist theory. 

Her dissertation, “(Being a) Feminist (is a) Struggle: Intersectional Feminist Politics in the Era of the Women’s March”, focuses on the ways that feminist politics are animated by debates concerning the political demands of intersectionality. The dissertation offers critical interpretations of the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw to trace the development of intersectionality as an analytic with connections to pragmatic uses of civil rights law and juridical understandings of politics. She argues that Crenshaw’s theorization of intersectionality offers us an ambiguous understanding of intersectionality’s politics that leaves open multiple avenues of radical resistance and practices of solidarity. Her current research extends this argument, focusing on Crenshaw’s understanding of racial solidarity in relation to ambivalence. This work attends closely to Crenshaw’s understanding of sexual harassment as a political problem, the relationship between intersectionality and radical feminism, and how Crenshaw’s articulation of sexual marginalization might help us rethink feminist politics in the wake of the #metoo movement. 

You can read more about her research at rhiannonlove.squarespace.com

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.

Associate Director
she/her/hers
tbrazas@uchicago.edu
773-795-6503

Tate joined the Center in 2014 where she provides administrative, financial, operational and programming support. 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. 

Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity

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