The Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality

Professor
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Prof. Carr is interested in the ways people talk about social problems, and how that talk shapes social work interventions. She sustains particular interests in cultural and clinical theories of addiction, the politics of therapeutic practices, and both everyday and explicitly formalized modes of political communication-especially in relation to gender, race and sexuality. Her current research focuses on American social workers' theories of language, and how those theories influence interactions with clients.

Associate Professor
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Professor Chu focuses on the politics of mobility and its mediation across spacetime, including the intersectional dimensions of gender, sexuality, class, race and migrancy. Additionally, her teaching and research agendas are inspired by feminist epistemologies, particularly drawn from postcolonial and BIPOC feminist traditions, that seek to hone situated ways of thinking Otherwise about the problem-spaces, citational politics and sociality of knowledge production. Her most recent work centers on the temporal politics animated by infrastructural developments, IT-driven logistics and the near- and reshoring of digital supply chains betwixt and between China and the U.S.

Associate Professor

Prof. Dawdy works at the intersections of ethnography, archaeology, and history in the U.S. and Gulf-Caribbean. She has written on informal economies and histories of capitalism, particularly as inflected with dynamics of gender and sexuality. She is the author of Building the Devil’s Empire: French Colonial New Orleans (UChicago Press 2008); Patina: A Profane Archaeology (UChicago Press 2016), and American Afterlives: Reinventing Death in the Twenty-first Century (Princeton 2021).

Mae & Sidney G. Metzl Distinguished Service Professor
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Prof. Gal is presently doing research analyzing right-wing and anti-gender discourse in Europe. Her work focuses as well on the construction of gender and discourses of reproduction.

Keywords: language, discourse, gender politics especially in Europe, reproductive politics 

Assistant Professor
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Prof. Takabvirwa studies governance, migration, and the state in Southern Africa. She is working on two projects at the moment. The first is a book manuscript on policing on Zimbabwean roads, based on ethnographic fieldwork she conducted. The second project, which is under development, is on the changing meanings of marriage and intimacy in Southern Africa, particularly among Zimbabweans as they live between countries. Her research and teaching are informed by questions on the politics of representation and in the role of African fiction in interrogating and generating Africanist theories of power, citizenship, and intimacy.

Keywords: governance, policing, intimacy, citizenship, migration 

Associate Professor
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Alice Yao's research interest focus on imperialism and the ways conquered subjects engage with concepts such as the “frontier” and the “tribal” in their everyday and non-quotidian (e.g. ritual) life. The geographic focus of her work is the region identified with Dian polity or the “Southern Silk Road” in southwest China, a border zone of the Han Empire (202BC – 202AD). Her approach combines archaeology and environmental studies to understand how local peoples navigated the territorial politics and economic systems of state orders. She is also interested in using multidisciplinary methods to examine the dynamics of food and gender politics both past and present.

Keywords: East Asian imperialism, archaeology of sex and gender, histories of child rearing, histories of sexuality in China 

Neubauer Family Associate Professor

Prof. Atkinson's research interests are in architecture and urban history in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Italy. Situated primarily in Italy, his current scholarship considers the social dimensions of architecture through a series of research themes derived from his interest in the historical understanding of urban experience.

Professor
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Claudia Brittenham's research focuses on the art of ancient Mesoamerica, with particular attention to the ways that the materiality of art and the politics of style contribute to our understanding of the ontology of images. Her work explores the place of art in a world before borders, where people, objects, and ideas moved throughout ancient Mesoamerica and beyond, examining how works of art mediated identity and belonging.

Associate Professor

Chelsea Foxwell’s scholarship ranges from the medieval through modern periods of Japanese art with special emphasis on the 19th and 20th centuries. Her work focuses on Japan’s artistic interactions with the rest of East Asia and beyond, nihonga and yōga; “export art” and the world’s fairs; practices of image circulation, exhibition, and display; and the relationship between image-making and the kabuki theater. A member of the Committee on Japanese Studies and the Center for the Art of East Asia, she is a contributor to the Digital Scrolling Paintings and the Reading Kuzushiji projects.

Assistant Professor
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Jacobé Huet is a historian of modern architecture with a focus on the transcultural Mediterranean. She is particularly interested in the circulation of architectural forms and ideas, intersections between modernism and vernacular, and depictions of architecture in art and literature. Huet is completing the manuscript for her first book, a reciprocal history of the white cube as a vernacular-modernist motif in the colonial and postcolonial Mediterranean.

Associate Professor
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On leave 2024-25

Dr. Post’s scholarship is preoccupied with minoritarian aesthetics and racial performativity, especially (though not exclusively) in black American culture. She explores the ways that minoritized subjects work with or against the expectations that surround their race, as well as other aspects of their embodiment (gender, dis/ability, and so forth), in literature, visual culture, fine art, theater, and movement.

Keywords: black studies, performance studies, cultural studies, queer of color critique

Associate Professor

Prof. Ward specializes in 19th and 20th century art. Her research interests center on the reception of works of art and on the relationship between the theory, criticism and practice of painting, the history of exhibitions and museums.

Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor

Prof. Wu works on early Chinese art. His special research interests include relationships between visual forms (architecture, bronze vessels, pictorial carvings and murals, etc.) and ritual, social memory, and political discourses.

Assistant Professor of Surgery
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I am an assistant professor within the section of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery. I have a vested interested in the clinical care, and specifically voice care, of trans patients. Current academic interests include improving metrics for success after gender affirming voice and tracheal shave surgery.

Assistant Professor of Public Health Sciences
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Joseph Dov Bruch is a social epidemiologist and health services researcher. His work is broadly focused on examining the relationship between the financial sector and population health and health care delivery. He has a specific interest in the influence of financial firms in the “women’s health industry” and studies the role of private equity and venture capital firms in this industry. As part of this work, he also leads the Health Care Finance team in the GenderSci lab at Harvard University. The Health Care Finance team aims to examine the implications of financial firms on the health of women and gender minorities.

Keywords: social epidemiology, health care finance, health policy 

Associate Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology
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Julie Chor, MD, MPH, is an Associate Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology in the Section of Complex Family Planning and an Assistant Director of the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics. A dedicated educator, Dr. Chor serves as the Program Director for the Fellowship in Complex Family Planning, Assistant Director for the MS3 Obstetrics and Gynecology Clerkship and co-Director for the Pritzker School of Medicine’s first year Doctor-Patient Relationship course. Her academic and clinical work focuses on understanding and addressing barriers that adolescents and young adults face in seeking and obtaining reproductive health care.

AAssistant Professor of Surgery
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I am an Assistant Professor within the division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery. With both complete General Surgery and Plastic Surgery training, I use the breadth of knowledge acquired through both specialties to provide head-to-toe gender affirming care while placing emphasis on the intellectual, emotional, and social aspects of the patient’s process. My current academic interests lie in program building and standardization of gender affirming care centers as well as advocacy in equity and equality of all peri-operative stages as it relates to gender affirming care.

Keywords: Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery

Assistant Professor, Obstetrics & Gynecology
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Dr. Fisher is interested in building integrated gender-affirming care programs across a number of specialties, with a primary commitment in gender-affirming Obstetrics and Gynecology services. Although his work is primarily clinical, he has a particular research interest in the intersection of transgender medicine and pregnancy care, as well as the impact of gender-affirming treatments on gynecologic issues.

Instructor of Medicine

I am a general internist, pediatrician, and health services researcher in the Biological Sciences Division. As a clinician, I practice primary care for adults and kids, and hospital medicine for adults on the inpatient medicine units at the University of Chicago Medicine Hospital. As a researcher, I study how sociocultural pressures to convey (especially precarious) dimensions of social identity (with a focus on male gender identity) can lead to adverse health outcomes, particularly from chronic, preventable disease.

Research Assistant Professor & Faculty Director of Ci3
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Lee conducts reproductive health policy research, collecting data and translating findings to inform legislation and policy implementation. Her research covers topics such as access to contraception and abortion, the role of insurance, religious refusals in health care, and consent and confidentiality for young people.

Assistant Professor Pediatric Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism
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Dr. Michelle Lemelman is an Assistant Professor of Pediatric Endocrinology at the University of Chicago. She received her MD at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine and came to the University of Chicago in 2012 where she completed her Pediatric Residency, and Pediatric Endocrinology Fellowship. She joined the faculty in 2018. Dr. Lemelman has pursued clinical and scholarly work focused on endocrine disorders in the Neonatal ICU and pediatric thyroid cancer. However, her passion has been with advocacy and treatment of gender diverse youth. She is a member of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) where she earned certifications in foundational and advanced courses for transgender care. She is the Medical Director of the TransCARE clinic at the University of Chicago, where she is helping to develop a multidisciplinary clinic for gender diverse youth and adults.

Assistant Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology
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Hillary McLaren, MD specializes in Obstetrics and Gynecology, Contraception and Family Planning.

Senior Instructional Professor of Public Health Sciences
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David Moskowitz studies HIV/STI prevention, sexual and psychological health of sexual minorities, and the relationship between social identity and risk-taking behaviors. In particular, his research explores the lives of adolescent and adult gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men, transgender youth and adults, as well as all individuals who identify outside sexual and gender continuum poles. He also has expertise in the creation and implementation of comprehensive sexual education programs for teens that maximize different communication channels (e.g., online, through social media, in-person). He is the primary advisor for students in the University of Chicago, Master of Public Health Program, and teaches courses that focus on public health, health communication, program planning and evaluation, and sexual health.

Research Assistant Professor & Director of Structural Interventions
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Darnell N. Motley, PhD, is a clinical community psychologist committed to promoting sexual and relationship health in queer communities of color. Dr. Motley’s research examines and challenges the ways that structural factors (like racism, homophobia, and health stigma) function to limit the experiences of racial, sexual, and gender minorities, as well as individuals living with HIV. More specifically, Dr. Motley uses qualitative research to inform the development and adaptation of interventions intended to impact social determinants of sexual health. Currently, Dr. Motley is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Chicago and Director of Structural Interventions for the Chicago Center for HIV Elimination.

Associate Professor of Surgery; Assistant Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology
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Dr Raheem, MD is a board-certified urologist specializing in men’s sexual health, male infertility and reproductive urology. He works closely with UChicago Medicine’s Center for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility team to provide the best treatment plan for patients suffering from infertility and reproductive conditions including transgender and non-conforming people. Dr. Raheem offers advanced sperm retrieval procedures including, microsurgical testicular sperm retrieval (microTESE), testicular sperm aspiration (TESA) and microsurgical vasectomy reversal. He also supports cancer survivors at the Comprehensive Cancer Center by improving quality of erectile, urinary and reproductive health. In addition to his clinical work, Dr. Raheem is involved in clinical and transitional research to better understand patient-reported outcomes in prosthetics and reproductive urology, and he is studying novel ways to discover biomarkers and therapeutics in the field of sexual medicine.Dr. Raheem’s research has been published in over 125 peer-reviewed publications and eight book chapters, including the recently released textbooks of Epidemiology of Male Infertility in Scientific American 2018 and Manual of Sperm Retrieval and Preparation in Human Assisted Reproduction 2021. He is currently an associate editor of Sexual Medicine and Sexual Medicine Reviews, the official journal of the Sexual Medicine Society of North America (SMSNA).

Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology; Dean for Diversity & Inclusion
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Dr. Romero is a Professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Chicago. Her research program focuses on identifying novel interventions for ovarian cancer prevention and treatment. To approach this her lab evaluates the cancer protective effects of medications that are widely used for non-cancer indications. Given the high cost and difficulty of new cancer drug development, drug repurposing or taping into the anti-carcinogenic potential of economical and widely used drugs is an important paradigm shift in cancer research. Her research program integrate of in vitro cancer biology techniques, mouse models of ovarian cancer and human clinical data and samples. Using this integrated approach, her group has reported anti-ovarian cancer effects of two commonly used medications: metformin used for diabetes and statins used for high cholesterol. Complementary to her research endeavors, Dr. Romero’s clinical practice provides comprehensive obstetrical and gynecological care to women at high risk for gynecologic malignancies, including those with a genetic predisposition to cancer.

Associate Professor of Medicine
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I am a clinician-educator and direct the Women’s Health and Gender-Based Care track in our internal medicine residency. Through this track residents have the opportunity to receive additional training focused on how a patient’s gender impacts their health. I also give a lecture series to the residents on key topics of women’s health.

Professor of Medicine and Public Health Sciences
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Dr. John Schneider MD, MPH, Professor of Medicine, Epidemiology and Social Work is a network epidemiologist and infectious disease specialist at the University of Chicago. Clinically, he specializes in HIV prevention and has a specific interest in the provision of high-quality care to young Black Sexual Minority Men and transgender women. He has extensive experience with advancing the physician patient relationship in resource restricted settings, including his current clinic at a Federally Qualified Health Center on the South Side of Chicago – Howard Brown Health 55th - and during his previous training in Southern India.

Keywords: Epidemiology, HIV Infection, Mathematical Model, Modeling, Decision, program implementation, Sex Behavior, Sexually Transmitted Disease, Social Network, substance use, Syphilis

Professor of Family Medicine
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Debra Stulberg, MD, MAPP, studies reproductive health and healthcare in the United States, to identify and assess ways of improving pregnancy outcomes and reducing racial and socioeconomic disparities. Her areas of focus include institution-level barriers to care (such as religious hospital sponsorship, or federal funding bans for abortion care), and strategies to overcome these barriers. Her research uses qualitative and quantitative methods from the social sciences, clinical sciences, and public health.

Associate Professor
        On leave 2024-25

Allyson Nadia Field’s research centers on African American film, archives and archival absences, and the use of film and media to challenge social inequities. She is the editor of a special double issue of Feminist Media Histories on speculative approaches to media histories (2022) and is currently working on a large scale project on Black women filmmakers of the 1970s and 80s. She is the author of Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film & The Possibility of Black Modernity (Duke, 2015) and co-editor of L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema (UC Press, 2015) and Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film (Duke, 2019).

Keywords: cinema and media studies, race and representation, African American media, feminist film, social justice media, archives

William Rainey Harper Professor

Prof. Jagoda works in the fields of new media studies and twentieth and twenty-first century American literature and culture with particular interests in digital games, electronic literature, virtual worlds, television, cinema, the novel, and media theory. His first book, Network Aesthetics (University of Chicago Press, 2016), explores how literature, films, television, videogames, and digital media art alter human experiences with interconnected life in the early twenty-first century. He is currently at work on a book project about experimental games that draws from fields of affect theory, Marxist theory, and gender studies. For more information, see: http://patrickjagoda.com/.

George V. Bobrinskoy Professor

Prof. Majumdar's interests span histories of Indian cinema, gender and marriage in colonial India, and Indian intellectual thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is currently engaged in two projects: a history of the film society movement in India from 1947 to 1977, and an intellectual history of key concepts such as society, civility, and civilization in the Hindu and Muslim Bengali contexts during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Assistant Professor
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AE Stevenson’s research centers on Black women and girls and how they have changed online visual culture and language. Additionally, she focuses on Black women’s film histories and gender and race in horror cinemas. Her work has been published in Catalyst and Feminist Media Histories.

Keywords: Black feminist studies; Black studies; social media studies; horror; Black women's filmmaking history

Helen A. Regenstein Distinguished Service Professor

Prof. Bartsch-Zimmer's teaching is primarily devoted to Roman literature and culture, and her research addresses critical terms for the study of Classics and the satirist Persius. Her research interests have recently been focused on the study of ancient Greco-Roman sexuality, especially the relationship between same-sex eros and philosophical thought.

Edward Olson Professor
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Prof. Nooter works in the areas of Greek tragedy and adaptions, classical and modern poetry, sound studies, and queer theory. Her most recent books are a monograph called Greek Poetry in the Age of Ephemerality (Cambridge, 2023) and a translated volume entitled How to Be Queer: An Ancient Guide to Sexuality (Princeton, 2024). She is currently working on a book called Parenthood: Identity and Extremity in Ancient and Modern Culture, which explores questions of identity and agency in portrayals of parenthood in ancient Greek literature and modern American writing, particularly from nonwhite and queer perspectives.

Keywords: Greek poetry, particularly Attic tragedy; modern theater and adaptation; literary theory and linguistics; Greek religion

Associate Professor

Prof. Wray's teaching interests are mostly within Greek, Roman, and early modern European literature, including courses on incest in Roman literature and heroines of ancient tragedy and early modern opera. He has written on manhood in Roman poetry and is currently focusing on relations and relatedness in classical epic and drama.

Assistant Professor
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Eman Abdelhadi studies religion and gender's intersecting influences on identity, community affiliations, political views and economic outcomes. Her current book project relies on in-depth life history interviews to trace entry and exit into American Muslim communities and explain how and why those trajectories are gendered. Using survey data, her other research has investigated the ways and settings in which religion matters for women’s participation in the public sphere as well as the relationship between religious orthodoxy and political conservatism in the United States.

Keywords: gender, religion, migration, identity, Muslims 

Professor

Prof. Cole's scholarship attempts to analyze the interplay between historical change and individual experience, her work addresses the substantive topics of memory and forgetting, youth and generational change, gender, sexuality and transnational kinship.

Professor and Chair

Michele Friedner is a medical anthropologist who researches how political economic changes in India have created new opportunities and constraints for deaf and disabled people in the arenas of employment, education, politics, religion, and everyday life. She also attends to the limits of disability as both a juridical and legislative category and as an explanatory concept within social theory and is interested in intersections of disability, gender, and sexuality both in India and more broadly.

Assistant Professor
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Chiara Galli is a sociologist interested in international migration, childhood, the life course, and law and policy. She studies how immigration laws shape people's lives, and how children differ from adults as migratory actors and legal subjects. She also examines how intersections of gender and age shape refugee migration and the reception of asylum-seekers in countries like the United States. Her forthcoming book is an ethnography of Central American unaccompanied minors’ experiences seeking asylum in the US, with the help of immigration attorneys.

Professor
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Professor Keels' principal research interests concern issues of race-ethnicity, inequality, poverty, and the integration of quantitative and qualitative methods.

Associate Professor
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Prof. Mateo studies developmental and biological mechanisms of adaptive behaviors that enhance survival and reproduction in species-typical environments. In particular, she investigates the reciprocal interactions among social, hormonal and genetic processes and how they differentially affect behavior depending on ecological and social contexts.

William Claude Reavis Distinguished Service Professor

Prof. Shweder's recent research examines the scopes and limits of pluralism and the multicultural challenge in Western liberal democracies. He examines the norm conflicts that arise when people migrate from Africa, Asia and Latin America to countries in the 'North,' bringing with them culturally endorsed practices (e.g., arranged marriage, animal sacrifice, circumcision of both girls and boys, ideas about parental authority) that mainstream populations in the United States or Western Europe sometimes find aberrant and disturbing. He asks how much accommodation to cultural diversity occurs and ought to occur under such circumstances.

Assistant Professor
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Professor El Shakry is a scholar of twentieth- and twenty-first century literature, visual culture, and criticism from North Africa and the Middle East, with an emphasis on the relationship between aesthetics and ethics. Her research is at the intersection of literary and cultural studies, Islamic philosophy, film and art theory, as well as gender and sexuality studies. She specializes in the region of Northwestern Africa known as the Maghreb, which encompasses the countries of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. Her first book, The Literary Qurʾan: Narrative Ethics in the Maghreb (Fordham University Press, 2019; winner of the MLA’s 2020 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies) examines Arabic and Francophone novels from the Maghreb through their intertextuality with the Qurʾan and Islamic intellectual traditions. Professor El Shakry's ongoing projects include a book on twentieth-century cultural journals from the Maghreb and a comparative study of contemporary speculative and science fiction, film, and art from the Middle East and North Africa. For more information, see: https://hodaelshakry.com/.

Keywords: Arabic literature, Francophone studies, Comparative Literature, science fiction, speculative fiction, religion, Islam, mysticism, aesthetics, queer theory, gender-sexuality, film, visual culture, art 

Associate Professor
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My scholarship and teaching reimagines comparative literary method—particularly comparative work on empire and nationalism, critical approaches to ethnicity, gender and sexuality—from the vantage point of the Caucasus and Central Asia. I am working on a new book manuscript, Feeling Collapse, which explores waning attachments to the idea of Soviet internationalism in collage, performance and video art experiments produced in the Caucasus and Central Asia, from the 1980s through the 1990s. I discuss how these art experiments shaped new forms of politics, in particular conceptions of difference and forms of community that focalized around alternative imaginaries of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. I am also cowriting a queer anticolonial children's book, Azbuka Strikes Back, with artist collective Slavs and Tatars and working on a project on costume during the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Associate Professor
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Prof. Galvin’s research and teaching interests include U.S. Latinx Literature, Hemispheric Studies, Translation Studies, Comparative Poetics, Literature of War, Comparative Modernisms, multilingual poetics, and the Oulipo. Her first book, News of War: Civilian Poetry 1936-1945 (Oxford University Press, 2018) is an account of how poets confront the problem of writing about war, with a focus on civilian literatures of the Spanish Civil War and World War II and an epilogue on contemporary poetry published in the U.S. about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. She is currently at work on a book project on U.S. Latinx poetry and hemispheric poetics. Prof. Galvin is also a poet and a translator.

Associate Instructional Professor

Nisha Kommattam is a scholar of comparative literature as well as gender & sexuality studies, with a focus on South Asia and Southern India (Malayalam Literature, Kerala Studies). She is currently working on a book manuscript on queerness and trauma in South India. Other research interests include literatures of migration, inter-Asia comparisons, and the transnational entanglements of pioneering queer German writers in fin-de-siècle Europe. Recent publications include Are they Women? A Novel concerning the Third Sex by Aimée Duc (Broadview Press 2020, translated and edited with Margaret Breen) and Sind es Frauen? Roman über das dritte Geschlecht by Aimée Duc (Querverlag 2020, edited with Margaret Breen).

Assistant Professor

I am a scholar of Jewish Studies, Gender Studies, and labor history, with particular attention to the subjects of statelessness, anarchism, and borderlands literature. My forthcoming book is titled Horizons Blossom, Borders Vanish: Anarchism and Yiddish Literature (Yale University Press). This project examines the literary production, language politics, and religious thought of Jewish anarchist movements from 1870 to the present in Moscow, Tel Aviv, London, Buenos Aires, New York City, and elsewhere. The book’s archive includes early Proletarian (svetshop) poetry, political theology, and modernist literature. I am also co-editor (with Kenyon Zimmer) of the volume With Freedom in Our Ears: Histories of Jewish Anarchism (University of Illinois Press). My second project is a study of Polish writer, philosopher, and art critic Debora Vogel (also written Dvoyre Fogel, 1900-1942). Deeply engaged with the artistic avant-garde, her aesthetic theory and practice anticipated postwar experimental representations of domestic temporality and women’s labor. I organized a Vogel symposium at U-Chicago and co-edited a special issue of In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies dedicated to her work. Other ongoing projects include a comparative study of racialization, indigeneity, and colonial education in Puerto Rico and Native American residential schools in the United States. I serve on the International Editorial Board for Manchester University Press' Contemporary Anarchist Studies Series. I have held fellowships at the Frankel Center of the University of Michigan, National Yiddish Book Center, the Joseph A. Labadie Collection, and elsewhere. I have also worked as a muralist, community organizer, and set designer.

Keywords: anarchism, Jewish Studies, Yiddish, Comparative Literature, poetics, Animal Studies, Queer Studies 

Assistant Professor
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My research and teaching focus on pre- and postmodern histories and theories of gender, sexuality, desire, and devotion. My work draws from the archives of Christian mysticism, critical theory, and queer and feminist theory, especially queer of color critique. I am particularly interested in contemporary medievalisms; the history of critical theory; psychoanalysis; AIDS literature; religion and literature; and religion and sexuality. My current book project explores the relationship between monastic liturgy and the embodied, erotic, and communal aspects of Christian mystical poetics.

Associate Professor

Prof. Wray's teaching interests are mostly within Greek, Roman, and early modern European literature, including courses on incest in Roman literature and heroines of ancient tragedy and early modern opera. He has written on manhood in Roman poetry and is currently focusing on relations and relatedness in classical epic and drama.

Assistant Professor

Prof. Ferreira is a writer and translator specializing is the personal essay and ‘weird fiction,’ particularly on the role and contribution of women to speculative fiction, and the effects of war and displacement on the stories marginalized groups tell themselves and others.

Assistant Professor

Julie Iromuanya is the author of Mr. and Mrs. Doctor (Coffee House Press), a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, the Etisalat Prize for Literature, and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for Debut Fiction. Her scholarly-critical work has most recently appeared in Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism and Callaloo: A Journal of African American Arts and Letters. New work is forthcoming in Afropolitan Literature as World Literature  (Bloomsbury). 

Associate Senior Instructional Professor; Associate Director, Program in Creative Writing
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Ryan Van Meter writes fiction and literary non-fiction, often centering on issues of sexual and gender identity, family dynamics, and nostalgia. His new essay collection wonders about kinds of desire—for romantic love, self-acceptance of body image, friendship and kinship, and empowerment, to name a few—as well as the consequences of denying desire. He is also at work on finishing a novel.

Assistant Professor
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Prof. Bartram studies housing, the environment, and intersectional inequalities. Her work focuses on the policies and regulations related to physical aspects of housing and their selective and disparate enforcement, particularly in the context of aging housing stock and climate crises.

Associate Professor

Prof. Bouris' primary research areas are in the identification of parental influences on adolescent and young adult sexual behavior and health. She is particularly interested in developing interventions and practice recommendations to help parents prevent sexually transmitted infections, HIV infection, and unplanned pregnancies among their adolescent and young adult children.

Professor
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Prof. Carr is interested in the ways people talk about social problems, and how that talk shapes social work interventions. She sustains particular interests in cultural and clinical theories of addiction, the politics of therapeutic practices, and both everyday and explicitly formalized modes of political communication-especially in relation to gender, race and sexuality. Her current research focuses on American social workers' theories of language, and how those theories influence interactions with clients.

Associate Professor

Gina Fedock is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Service Administration. Her work centers on improving women's physical and mental health and spans the boundaries of public health, criminal justice, and social work. Her research focuses on women’s interactions with formal systems (e.g. medical and criminal-legal systems) and examines influencing factors on women’s health. In addition, she integrates women's experiences of gender-based violence, such as sexual violence and intimate partner violence, into her research. Through a human rights framework, her work advocates for addressing social injustices in order to improve women's health and wellbeing.

Samuel Deutsch Professor

Prof. Henly's fields of special interest include family poverty, child care and welfare policy, work-family strategies of low-wage workers, informal support networks, and employment discrimination.

Associate Professor
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Professor Johnson teaches social welfare policy and human behavior in the social environment and research methods. A family research scholar, his substantive research focuses on male roles and involvement in African American families, nonresident fathers in fragile families, and the physical and psychosocial health statuses of African American males. As a research methodologist, he is interested in the use of qualitative research methods in guiding policy and practice research.

Assistant Professor

Prof. Ma's work explores how the body—its health, illness, and disability—become a site for technical interventions, ethical practices, and population governance. Her current projects examine family care and community management of people with serious mental illnesses, as well as the rise of a disability rights movement, both in the context of contemporary China. She is also a disability rights activist, working particularly at the intersection of gender and disability.

George Herbert Jones Distinguished Service Professor

Prof. Marsh is broadly interested in the organization and delivery of social services and in treatment process and outcome, especially for services and treatments with women and children. Her current research focuses on gender differences in the impact of substance abuse treatment with a particular focus on the role of the client-provider relationship.

Senior Lecturer

Dr. Moore's scholarship is deeply influenced by Black feminist thought, which she uses to construct narratives of families. Her past scholarship has focused on the role of family dynamics of Gullah families as they navigate Heirs Property Rights on St. Helena Island, SC, as well as drawing on this work to further explore the impact of housing policies on family relationships. Her clinical work and training have been rooted in the work of the former, Jean Baker Miller Institute at Wellesley College focused on Relational Cultural theory, as well as the contemporary work of Black psychoanalysts, and focused on serving the interests of Black LGBTQI populations. Her current research project is focused on exploring the experiences of Non-tenure track instructors in Schools of Social Work. Her professional experiences in higher education have been focused on supporting the success of students as an administrator working in women's centers and in the arena of multicultural affairs. She is more than happy to be in touch with students who are eager to have conversations about navigating diverse yet intersecting intellectual pursuits and professional aspirations.

Neubauer Family Assistant Professor
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Dr. Palmer Molina's research seeks to promote the well-being of marginalized young children and families by advocating for the expansion of two-generation and whole-family approaches across service sectors. In particular, her research examines the effects of ecological and structural risk factors on maternal mental health, parenting, and child mental health and development, and explores the effectiveness of family interventions for multiply stressed mothers.

Keywords: Maternal well-being, mental health, family support, early childhood, social work

Hermon Dunlap Smith Professor

Prof. Roderick is an expert in urban school reform, high stakes testing, minority adolescent development, and school transitions. Her work has focused attention on the transition to high school as a critical point in students' school careers and her new work examines the transition to college among Chicago Public School students. In prior work, Professor Roderick led a multi-year evaluation of Chicago's initiative to end social promotion. She has conducted research on school dropout, grade retention, and the effects of summer programs. She is an expert in mixing qualitative and quantitative methods in evaluation.

Assistant Instructional Professor

S. Simmons is a qualitative scholar and educator who believes in the power of stories. S’s current research interests center the lives of queer and trans people in and out of collegiate environments, specifically their identity, personal, and professional development and experiences. With interests in social identity and social justice, S’s teaches courses on Self-Awareness, Intergroup Dialogue, Human Behavior, and Trans* Experiences.

Assistant Professor
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Dr. Margaret Thomas studies structural sources of inequities in wellbeing among children and families in the US, with a particular focus on the impacts of material hardship and the consequences of social policies. One strand of her research examines the policy and community contexts which shape the health and wellbeing of sexual and gender minority youth. She teaches courses on US policy, poverty, and quantitative research methods.

Keywords: Child Welfare and Child Protection, Child Welfare System, Children and Adolescents, Family, Food Insecurity, Guaranteed Income, LGBTQIA+, Material Hardship, Poverty, Social Welfare Policy, Social Work

Assistant Instructional Professor of International Development and Peace in the Muslim World
she/her/hers

Maliha Chishti is a postcolonial feminist researcher and aid practitioner in the field of gender and post-conflict peacebuilding. As the former Director of the Hague Appeal for Peace at the United Nations, Maliha helped initiate the historic Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security. Her publications and research areas include gender, the war on terror and peacebuilding in Muslim-majority contexts. She teaches Introduction to Peacebuilding, Women, Development and Politics and Women, Peace and Security.

Associate Professor of Theology

Prof. Culp works in constructive theology, especially in relation to feminist theologies. She has written on protest and resistance as theological themes and religious sensibilities, on a theology of Christian community, on feminist and womanist theologies, and on "experience" in contemporary theology.

Associate Professor of Islamic Studies and the Anthropology of Religion
he/him/his

Alireza Doostdar is an anthropologist who studies Islam, science, gender, embodiment, and the state. His first book is about occultism and spiritual exploration in contemporary Iran. He is currently working on two new projects: one on the Islamization of social science, and the other on the embodiment of the Islamic state in Iran through everyday acts of intimacy.

Associate Professor of Environmental Ethics
she/her/hers

Professor Fredericks' research focuses on sustainability, sustainable energy, environmental guilt and shame, and environmental justice; her work draws upon pragmatic and comparative religious ethics. Her research and teaching increasingly examines issues of gender and sexuality in ethics including the disproportionate burdens of environmental degradation faced by women and the ways the environmental movement has gendered expectations for advocacy and everyday life. Her latest book, Environmental Guilt and Shame, addresses these topics.

John Nuveen Professor
she/her/hers

Sarah Hammerschlag is a scholar in the area of Religion and Literature. Her research thus far has focused on the position of Judaism in the post-World War II French intellectual scene, a field that puts her at the crossroads of numerous disciplines and scholarly approaches including philosophy, literary studies, and intellectual history. She is currently working on a book with Amy Hollywood and Constance Furey on religion, literature and politics. Her contribution focuses on the French-Jewish philosopher Sarah Kofman, and her treatment of the themes of mastery, fidelity and the fetish.

Associate Professor
she/her/hers

Prof. Heo is an anthropologist of religion, media and economy. Her current research interests include Christian-Muslim relations in the Arab Middle East and Cold War capitalism in the Asian Pacific Rim. She teaches courses on gender and sexuality in the study of religion and politics.

Keywords: religion, anthropology, ethnography

Assistant Professor

Dr. Pierce Taylor’s research focuses on gender and emotion in premodern religion in South India. Her current book project, “Embodying Souls: Emotion, Gender, and Animality in Premodern South Asian Religion,” considers the soteriological tension in Jainism between experiencing and escaping the pleasures of the body. Located at a moment of literary change between the Sanskrit and Old Kannada in the medieval Deccan (south-west India), it argues that literature became a central techne for Jain poets to negotiate a worldly reality filled with attachment, embodiment, desire, and pleasure antithetical to the traditions’ focus on withdrawal and detachment. Her second book project considers the rich tradition of ghost stories (vētāḷa/bētāḷa) in Sanskrit and Old Kannada as a site that challenges gender normativity, various forms of cultural hierarchy, and the boundaries between the living and the dead. Her work is broadly informed by theoretical developments in the study of affect, animality, disability and the body, and gender.

Assistant Professor
she/her/hers

Erin Galgay Walsh’s research focuses on the reception of biblical literature, ascetic practices, and religious poetry within the Mediterranean world. Her current book project examines how Syriac and Greek poets retold and expanded biblical stories featuring unnamed New Testament women. Throughout her work on New Testament and early Christian literature, Prof. Walsh attends to issues around gender and sexuality with special attention to ethical and interpretative debates.

Keywords: Biblical interpretation, gender, Christianity, Religious Literature, history, Bible, medicine eastern Christianity, Syriac

Professor

Susan L. Burns is Professor of Japanese History, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College. She researches and teaches the social and cultural history of early modern and modern Japan, with a focus on the history of medicine, health, and the body. She has worked extensively on issues of reproductive health and reproductive rights. She is co-editor (with Barbara J. Brooks) of Gender and Law in the Japanese Imperium (Hawaii University Press, 2015) and contributed the introduction and an essay on the criminalization of abortion and infanticide in late 19th century Japan. She is currently completing a study of an early modern Japanese obstetrician.

Associate Professor
she/her/hers

Prof. Choi's research and teaching evolve around the relationship between the culture of publication and the historical experiences of modern Koreans, including the experiences of Japanese colonial rule, national division, the Korean War, the Cold War, and democratization. Through exploration of them, she pursues her particular concerns with gender on the one hand and with the literary text as embodied entity on the other.

Associate Professor

Prof. Eyferth's scholarship focuses on the social history of the Chinese countryside in the 20th century and the history of gender, technology, and work. His current research looks at cotton production and textile work in the 1950s, and the impact of the socialist revolution and state industrialization policies on the everyday lives of rural women.

Associate Professor

Chelsea Foxwell’s scholarship ranges from the medieval through modern periods of Japanese art with special emphasis on the 19th and 20th centuries. Her work focuses on Japan’s artistic interactions with the rest of East Asia and beyond, nihonga and yōga; “export art” and the world’s fairs; practices of image circulation, exhibition, and display; and the relationship between image-making and the kabuki theater. A member of the Committee on Japanese Studies and the Center for the Art of East Asia, she is a contributor to the Digital Scrolling Paintings and the Reading Kuzushiji projects.

Associate Professor in Chinese Literature

Iovene's research and teaching focus on 20th and 21st century Chinese literature and film. She is currently working on two projects: one on migrant workers' autobiographical fiction and theater and the other on location, labor, and gender in 1970s Chinese cinema.

William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor

Prof. Zeitlin's research interests include the literary and cultural history of late imperial China with special interest in fiction and drama, especially the classical tale, autobiography and self-representation, gender and sexuality, and the interface between literature and medicine, particularly the case history. She is currently at work on a multi-phase collaborative project on Chinese opera film.

Associate Professor
she/her/hers

Rachel Glennerster is Associate Professor of Economics in the Division of Social Science. Her research includes evaluating the impact of microcredit, Community Driven Development, adolescent empowerment, and noncash incentives on women's health empowerment and voice in Bangladesh, India, and Sierra Leone. She teaches a graduate class on the practicalities of collecting data and running randomized trials and an undergraduate class on development economics with an emphasis on data. The challenges of measuring women's empowerment in a rigorous but contextually appropriate way is a covered in both classes as well as many other topics relevant to those interested in studying gender such as microcredit and ways to promote the voice of marginalized populations.

Research Associate Professor

Juanna Schrøter Joensen’s research seeks to quantify how incentives and circumstances interact with endowments and information in shaping human capital and income inequality. Her research reveals how financial and non-financial incentives can have very different impacts on individual behavior and success – depending on socioeconomic environment, multidimensional skills, and gender. Her current research also sheds light on women's' labor market returns to delaying pregnancy and the importance of access to effective contraceptives. She currently teaches an advanced elective course in Applied Microeconometrics with focus on how economic theory, institutional details, experiments, and microeconometric methods can be used to draw causal inference from data.

Associate Professor

Professor Brown specializes in American and African-American cultural production in the 20th century. Her current work explores the relationships between architecture, race, and narrative forms.

Karla Scherer Distinguished Service Professor in American Culture

Prof. Brown's areas of specialization are 19th and 20th-Century American literature, popular genres, Marxist theory and gender theory, naturalism, modern poetry. Recently, he has been working on the intersection of literary, visual, and material cultures, with an emphasis on "object relations in an expanded field."

Assistant Professor

Professor Chema works on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture. She is writing a book about poetic style and civic persuasion and another that studies handmade poetry collections to tell a story about the history of reading. These books, along with her teaching, are concerned with the gendering of language, literary forms, and discursive fields, which she approaches from a rhetorical perspective. 

Assistant Instructional Professor
she/her/hers

Emily Coit specializes in transatlantic literary and intellectual history. Her teaching and research focus on conversations about education, citizenship, and democracy in the US and Britain during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is especially interested in the histories of whiteness, higher education, and feminism. Her current book project examines the making and use of the Harvard Classics during the first decades of the twentieth century. She is also co-editing a volume of Henry James's earliest short stories for the Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James.

Keywords: Nineteenth-century American Literature, Nineteenth-century British Literature, Literary History, Intellectual History, Prose Fiction, Nonfiction Prose

Professor
he/him

Most broadly, my research concerns collective emotion as it takes shape in aesthetic and political forms. I have been especially interested in the capacity of aesthetic forms to imagine or enact new, queer modes of affiliation, community and action. For instance, in *Like Andy Warhol* (Chicago, 2017), I see in Warhol’s promiscuous liking a utopian impulse, an effort to imagine and create a queer world based on likeness and liking where otherwise prohibited or policed desires, feelings and ways of being might find a home.

Keywords: queer theory; feminist theory; affect theory; ACT UP; activism; Andy Warhol

Associate Professor
she/her/hers

Prof. Galvin’s research and teaching interests include U.S. Latinx Literature, Hemispheric Studies, Translation Studies, Comparative Poetics, Literature of War, Comparative Modernisms, multilingual poetics, and the Oulipo. Her first book, News of War: Civilian Poetry 1936-1945 (Oxford University Press, 2018) is an account of how poets confront the problem of writing about war, with a focus on civilian literatures of the Spanish Civil War and World War II and an epilogue on contemporary poetry published in the U.S. about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. She is currently at work on a book project on U.S. Latinx poetry and hemispheric poetics. Prof. Galvin is also a poet and a translator.

Neubauer Family Assistant Professor

Prof. Garcia researches the hemispheric literatures and cultures of the Americas, principally of the twentieth century. His inquiries have taken place in the fields of indigenous and Latino studies, American poetics, and environmental criticism, with the following questions focusing his work: how are semiotics and aesthetics an interface for racial and national positionalities? And how do those positions—that is, social locations of identity, race, gender, kinship, and ecology—change when cast in the aesthetic forms that one finds in signs on the outside of normative semiotics, troping, and figuration? The book that he is completing, Signs of the Americas: The Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu, examines the ongoing ability of such seemingly antiquated sign systems as Puebloan pictographs, Anishinaabe petroglyphs, Mayan hieroglyphs, and Andean khipu to express and shape contemporary experiences.

Professor
she/her/hers

Prof. Hadley's areas of research, writing, and teaching are 19th-Century British history, especially politics and economics, the novel, popular culture, cultural theory, and expository prose. Her most recent publication, From Political Economy to Economics (2019), is a collection of essays she co-edited, which focuses on keywords in the long history of capitalist-market theorization. Other central interests often evident in the courses Prof. Hadley offers include gender theory, urban studies, the novel, melodrama, children's culture, theories of nationalism and histories of affect. She is currently at work on a monograph that concerns the erasure of inequality in economic thought at the end of the nineteenth century.

William Rainey Harper Professor

Prof. Jagoda works in the fields of new media studies and twentieth and twenty-first century American literature and culture with particular interests in digital games, electronic literature, virtual worlds, television, cinema, the novel, and media theory. His first book, Network Aesthetics (University of Chicago Press, 2016), explores how literature, films, television, videogames, and digital media art alter human experiences with interconnected life in the early twenty-first century. He is currently at work on a book project about experimental games that draws from fields of affect theory, Marxist theory, and gender studies. For more information, see: http://patrickjagoda.com/.

Associate Professor
she/her/hers

As director of the digital project Beshrew Me!, MacKay focuses closely on the practices of subordination and supremacy that form the basis of late medieval and Renaissance shrew-taming plays—a surprisingly extensive and durable genre. Her research demonstrates the way that seemingly transient and marginal expressions of vernacular culture, including everyday sayings, objects, and gestures, transmit the social choreography of mastery across multiple domains, from the stable (where the subjects mastered include horses, dogs, and falcons), to the kitchen, to the schoolroom, to the plantations of English settler colonialism.

Associate Professor

Prof. Keenleyside’s research and teaching centers on the literature and culture of eighteenth-century Britain, with special interest in literary and intellectual history, gender and sexuality, the history of feminism, and animal studies. She is currently at work on a book on the poetry, novel, and history of ideas.

Professor

Josephine McDonagh’s work focuses mainly on nineteenth-century British literature in its global contexts, colonialism, and the politics and gender of literary expression. She has also written of population, family politics, and violence, including Child Murder and British Culture 1720-1900 (Cambridge UP, 2003). The question of migration is at the center of her current work. She is writing about migration in the nineteenth century, exploring the ways in which literature both responded to and helped to shape a transcontinental migratory culture during a time of mass emigration to settler colonies, and exploring its resonances with contemporary migration issues.

Associate Professor

Prof. Miller's fields are late-medieval literature and culture. Miller's research focuses conceptually on the intersections of psychoanalysis, feminism, and queer theory with ethics, theory of action, and philosophical psychology.

Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Assistant Professor of Renaissance and Early Modern English Literature
she/her/hers

Prof. Ndiaye’s research and teaching are at the intersection of early modern studies, critical race theory, theater and performance studies, and comparative literature. Her first book, Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022) explores the role that theatrical culture played in the racialization of blackness in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Europe. She is currently at work on a book exploring early modern historical instances and aesthetic representations of Black and Brown relations, frictions, and solidarities.

Keywords: early modern, theatre, performance, race, sexuality, gender

Director of CGS, 2006–2009

Professor

Prof. Nelson's research interests are in the areas of contemporary literature, twentieth-century American literature, African American literature, law and literature, literary history, nonfiction prose, poetry and poetics, the novel, feminism, gender and sexuality, and historicism (old and new). Her latest book, Tough Broads: Suffering and Style, explores the unsentimental, rigorous, and often "heartless" view of pain (to borrow a term from Hannah Arendt) in the work of some of the twentieth-century's most prominent women artists and intellectuals.

Andrew W. Mellon Professor
she/her/hers

Sianne Ngai works and teaches in the fields of aesthetic theory, Marxism, feminism, queer studies, and American literature. Her first book, Ugly Feelings, investigates the cultural forms that arise from non-prestigious, non-cathartic negative emotions—envy and irritation as opposed to anger and fear. Her second book, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. argues for the contemporary centrality of three everyday, vernacular aesthetic categories, treating them with the same philosophical seriousness as others have treated the beautiful and sublime. Her work is most broadly concerned with the analysis of aesthetic forms and judgments specific to capitalism.

Assistant Professor

Julie Orlemanski's research and teaching focus on two areas, on the culture and thought of the later Middle Ages and on the historicity of concepts organizing literary-critical and literary-historical study today (like genre, scale, fictionality, and modernity). She is completing a book on medicine, causation, and narrative in late-medieval England and is beginning work on a new project tentatively titled "Things without Faces: Prosopopoeia in Medieval Writing."

Assistant Professor of English
she/they

My scholarship examines the legacies of slavery and emancipation in the Americas, and particularly concerns how gender and sexuality structure race, labor, and capital. More broadly, I am committed to questions of Black feminisms, transnational feminisms, and materialist feminisms; Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora, African American, and feminist and queer visual cultures; archives; property and inheritance; and the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds.

Associate Professor
she/her/hers (any pronouns are fine)
On leave 2024-25

Dr. Post’s scholarship is preoccupied with minoritarian aesthetics and racial performativity, especially (though not exclusively) in black American culture. She explores the ways that minoritized subjects work with or against the expectations that surround their race, as well as other aspects of their embodiment (gender, dis/ability, and so forth), in literature, visual culture, fine art, theater, and movement.

Keywords: black studies, performance studies, cultural studies, queer of color critique

Assistant Professor
she/her/hers
On leave 2024-25

Both my research and teaching engage with women’s writing, race & gender studies, translation theory, and frames that disarticulate national paradigms. In my book project, “Entangled Testimonies: Technologies of Subjectivity in Asian American Women’s Writing," I read confessional texts narrated by women of colour who are grappling with the dislocation of migration, histories of violence, and multilingual realities. These include contemporary novels and the testimonies of “comfort women” compelled into sexual servitude during World War II.

Associate Professor

Prof. Scappettone's writing and research focus on new comparative approaches to modernism and modernity, with particular curiosity directed at the filigreed social projections and fallout embodied in literary, spatial, and visual arts. Broadly conceived, research and teaching interests include feminism and aesthetics, poetry and poetics, urbanism and alterations of "landscape," translation, and the fate of the avant-garde.

Professor
he/him/his
On leave 2024-25

Prof. Snorton is a cultural theorist who analyzes representations of race and gender throughout the 19th-21st centuries. He is the author of Nobody Is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) and Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), He is currently working on a book about swamps, tentatively entitled, Mud: Ecologies of Racial Meaning.

Assistant Professor
she/her/hers

SJ Zhang teaches courses on constructions of gender, race and forms of bondage before 1850, as well as black feminist archival theory and method. Her research focuses on how resistance practices and flight from enslavement by Black and Native individuals shaped textual and visual production in colonial North America and the Caribbean. Her current project, Going Maroon and Other Forms of Family, considers the lives of four women who went maroon between 1781 and 1814, with a focus on how reproduction and carceral forces shaped the decisions and the subsequent archives of each woman.

Keywords: gender, slavery, reproduction, family, marronage, archives

Professor
he/him/his
On leave 2024-25

Prof. Snorton is a cultural theorist who analyzes representations of race and gender throughout the 19th-21st centuries. He is the author of Nobody Is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) and Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), He is currently working on a book about swamps, tentatively entitled, Mud: Ecologies of Racial Meaning.

Instructional Professor
he/him/his

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.

Faculty Director of CGS/CSGS, 2010-2016

Charles E. Merriam Distinguished Professor

she/her/hers

Prof. Zerilli works in the areas of democratic theory, feminist theory, and continental philosophy.

Assistant Instructional Professor
she/her/hers

Nicole G. Burgoyne is a specialist in 20th century German literature, film, and the politics of culture. Specifically, her research focuses on Communist East Germany, its state institutions that carried out censorship, and individual authors' aesthetic decisions in creating texts and films within the confines of Socialist Realism. As an Assistant Instructional Professor, Burgoyne teaches topics ranging from fairy tales and folklore to contemporary politics, and the culture of German-speaking countries from the Cold War to the present. She also leads a local, community-based initiative called SPARK for German in Chicago public schools.

Assistant Instructional Professor in Yiddish
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Jessica Kirzane teaches courses on Yiddish language and culture. Her research focuses on Jewish racial self-construction in American Jewish literature, American Jewish writers’ geographical imagination vis a vis America, and Jewish women’s struggles within and against prescribed gender roles through romantic narratives. She is the translator of Diary of a Lonely Girl, or the Battle Agaisnt Free Love by Miriam Karpilove (Syracuse University Press, 2020) and a champion of the translation of Yiddish writing by women. She also publishes frequently about Yiddish Studies pedagogy. Kirzane is the editor-in-chief of In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies (www.ingeveb.org).

Frank Curtis Springer and Gertrude Melcher Springer Professor in the College and the Department of Germanic Studies
she/her/hers

Catriona MacLeod is senior editor of Word & Image, and author of Embodying Ambiguity: Androgyny and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Keller (Wayne State University Press, 1998) and Fugitive Objects: Sculpture and Literature in the German Nineteenth Century (Northwestern University Press, 2013), both of which deal with the relationship of femininity and aesthetics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her current book in progress, Romantic Scraps, explores how Romantic authors and visual artists cut, glue, stain, and recycle paper; generating paper cuts, collages, and ink blot poems in profusion. The book is particularly concerned with the critical edge of women’s craftwork with scissors.  MacLeod is the Frank Curtis Springer and Gertrude Melcher Springer Professor in the Department of Germanic Studies and the College at the University of Chicago.

Assistant Professor
she/her/hers

Sophie Salvo's research investigates the history of concepts of sex and gender in German literature and culture from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. Her current project focuses on the idea of "women's language" in a range of discourses, including ethnography, philology, literary Modernism, and feminist theory.

Philip and Ida Romberg Distinguished Service Professor
he/him/his

I have long worked at the intersection of philosophy, literature, and psychoanalysis, and so sexuality and gender play a significant role in my work. My new book, Untying Things Together: Philosophy, Literature, and a Life in Theory (U of Chicago Press, 2022) is in some ways an attempt to rewrite Freud’s famous Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality as Essay on the Sexuality of Theory.

Assistant Instructional Professor
she/her/hers

My research and teaching interests lie in global political economy, intellectual property law and the politics and geographies of knowledge and creative production, as well as South Asian history and politics. These interests come together in two courses on fashion. The first (Dressed to Kill? The Political Economy and Global Geographies of Fashion) focuses on what the fashion industry can tell us about the global economy, and the kinds of work—creative, destructive, mundane, gendered, precarious, as well as prestigious—and workers that produce fashion. The second (“Yes, but make it fashion!” Fashion, Culture, and Identity) explores how fashion simultaneously expresses and is shaped by identity, and examines the intersection of fashion with race, gender, sexuality, religion, and politics.

Assistant Senior Instructional Professor
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Cate Fugazzola is a sociologist whose research interests include social movements, gender and sexuality studies, transnational sociology, and qualitative research methods. Her book project, Words Like Water: Queer Mobilization and Social Change in China, focuses on sexual identity organizing in the People’s Republic of China, and examines strategies for social change in a political context that precludes avenues for direct political engagement. Her work is based on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and rhetorical analysis of online contexts, and takes the contemporary tongzhi (LGBT) movement in the People’s Republic of China as a case in which grassroots groups have achieved significant social change in virtual absence of public protest, and under conditions of tightening governmental control over civil society groups. Her future work will continue engaging with the tactical use of language and culture, looking at the way narratives, discourses, and identities interact with—and contribute to—processes of social change.

Keywords: social movements; social change; China; discourse analysis; ethnography; digital methods; transnational politics; video games

Assistant Professor and Senior Research Associate
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Maria Angélica Bautista is conducting research in Igboland, Nigeria understanding whether traditional political institutions empower women through collective action and “dual sex” political systems. We are conducting archival research looking at sources from the colonial period and ethnographic data gathered by Nigerian scholars around 1982. We are organizing the collectiong of a unique dataset to understand the influence of these institutions in different aspects of the villages (This research is joint with Andre Gray and Professor Sara Lowes at University of California, San Diego; Professor Andrea Velásquez from University of Colorado, Denver; Daniel Sonnensthul and Professor James Robinson at University of Chicago). Joint with Professor Maliha Chishti, Professor Bautista teaches Women, Development and Politics where they present how political economy and critical development studies approach to the study of women and international development.

Lecturer and Research Associate
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Maliha Chishti is a postcolonial feminist researcher and aid practitioner in the field of gender and post-conflict peacebuilding. As the former Director of the Hague Appeal for Peace at the United Nations, Maliha helped initiate the historic Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security. Her publications and research areas include gender, the war on terror and peacebuilding in Muslim-majority contexts. She teaches Introduction to Peacebuilding, Women, Development and Politics and Women, Peace and Security.

Philip K. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies

My research relates to gender in two ways: I do research on whether female leaders differ from male leaders in their proclivity to engage in conflict and set conflict policies. I also examine whether extending economic opportunities to marginalized youth can help foster more equitable gender attitudes in developing nations that face low rates of female participation in the labor market.

Assistant Professor

Yana Gallen is an Assistant Professor at the Harris School studying the gender wage gap. Her research focuses on understanding the sources of the gender pay gap---preferences, discrimination, or productivity? She is also interested in the impact of family friendly policies on the labor market, particularly looking at indirect or unanticipated effects of policy reforms. Yana teaches Advanced Microeconomics for MPPs and a course covering policy features of the Modern Welfare State.

Assistant Instructional Professor
she/her/hers

Karlyn Gorski is an Assistant Instructional Professor in the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. Her research concerns adolescents’ experiences of schooling, emphasizing their learning experiences across the official and unofficial curriculum. She uses ethnographic methods to explore how youth navigate the formal and informal structures of public schools. Her teaching spans diverse domains of public policy, including education, transportation, housing, marriage and family policy, and studies of risk and disaster. Karlyn holds degrees in Public Policy (AB'14) and Sociology (AB'18, PhD'22) from the University of Chicago, and is interested in human development, urban studies, gender and sexuality studies, and critical race and ethnic studies.

Keywords: ethnography, education policy, adolescents, qualitative methods

Assistant Instructional Professor
she/they

As an interdisciplinary ethnographer of medicine and gender, Paula draws from the disciplines of medical anthropology and sociology, transgender studies, and feminist science studies to understand how gendered futures are imagined and cultivated through medical and public health interventions. At the University of Chicago she teaches or has taught “Treating Trans”, “Troubling Adolescence,” “Introduction to Health and Society” and “Theories of Gender and Sexuality.” Their first book project, Practicing Gender, is about the meanings and uses of gender affirming medicine for young people in the contemporary US.

Director of CGS, 1996–1999

Associate Chair, Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity, Arthur and Joann Rasmussen Professor of Western Civilization in the College, and Professor of Modern European Social History in the History Department and Professor in the Department of RDI
she/her/hers

I am a scholar of the politics of everyday life, with a particular focus on gender, race, religion, material culture and everyday life. My expertise lies in Europe and the Atlantic World in the Modern period.

Keywords: gender, race, religion, Europe, Atlantic World

Professor

Susan L. Burns is Professor of Japanese History, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College. She researches and teaches the social and cultural history of early modern and modern Japan, with a focus on the history of medicine, health, and the body. She has worked extensively on issues of reproductive health and reproductive rights. She is co-editor (with Barbara J. Brooks) of Gender and Law in the Japanese Imperium (Hawaii University Press, 2015) and contributed the introduction and an essay on the criminalization of abortion and infanticide in late 19th century Japan. She is currently completing a study of an early modern Japanese obstetrician.

Interim Director of CGS, 2009–2010

Professor of History, the Law School and the College
she/her/hers

Prof. Dailey is a historian of the modern US interested in politics and law, especially relating to questions of civil rights, race and gender. Her most recently published book is White Fright: The Sexual Panic at the Heart of America's Racist History (Basic Books, 2020).

Assistant Professor
she/her/hers

Alice Goff is a historian of German cultural and intellectual life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her research and teaching centers on the history of the arts and their administration in the modern period, with a particular focus on questions of looting and restitution.

Assistant Instructional Professor
she/her/hers

Katie J. Hickerson is a cultural and political historian of Northeast Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She teaches courses on African history; race and ethnicity; fashion, empire, and capitalism; and global histories of death.

Associate Professor

My current research explores the relationship between early modern capitalism, race, gender and enslavement. My forthcoming book focuses on the laboring and social lives of enslaved and freed black seamen in the 18th and 19th century South Atlantic, while my next project analyzes the emergence of new gendered and racialized subjectivities in the Atlantic world, beginning with the start of Portugal’s West African trade in the fifteenth century. By placing African women at the heart of the narrative of Portugal’s colonial expansion, it explores how ideas of property, gender, race and sexuality influenced one another during this formative period.

Assistant Senior Instructional Professor
she/her/hers

Peggy O'Donnell Heffington's current research interests center on motherhood, the environment, generational change, and the ways in which history weighs on the present. Her first book, WITHOUT CHILDREN: The Long History of Not Being a Mother, explores the history of non-motherhood and non-biological parenthood in light of falling births and rising rates of childlessness today. Her next book will consider the recent history of midwifery and birth, seeing both--in an era of rising maternal mortality and risk--as part of an effort to reclaim woman-centered space, health care practices, and bodily autonomy across the political spectrum.

Keywords: motherhood, mothering, birth, midwifery, environment, childlessness

Associate Professor

Emily Osborn is a social and political historian of West Africa whose research focuses on precolonial and colonial state-craft and gender. Her first book, Our New Husbands Are Here: Households, Gender, and Politics in a West African State from the Slave Trade to Colonial Rule, investigates a central puzzle in West African political history: why women figure frequently in the political narratives of the precolonial period but then vanish altogether with the French colonial occupation of the late nineteenth century. Prof. Osborn's work also considers the history of slavery in Africa, labor and migration, material culture, and processes of technology transfer and diffusion.

Assistant Professor

Palmer is a cultural and intellectual historian focusing on long-durée intellectual history.  Her specialties include the Italian Renaissance, the recovery and reception of classical thought, the Enlightenment, the history of book and printing, and the history of philosophy, heresy, science, atheism, and freethought. She works extensively on radical heterodoxy and its cultural associations, such as the strong pre-modern tendency to associate Greek philosophy, atheism, and religious radicalism with sodomy, hedonism, criminality, magic, and witchcraft.  She works on libertinism, homoeroticism, and radical sexuality in early modern Europe, intersections between pornography and philosophical writing, and the ways different pre-modern models of the soul were used to construct or justify gender difference.  She also works on gender and sexuality in Japanese manga and anime, especially the influence of Osamu Tezuka and Takarazuka theater, and how Japanese media uses stories and images from Medieval and early modern European history are used for genderplay and gender experimentation.  She is also an author of science fiction and fantasy, and explores gender construction extensively in her published fiction.

Assistant Professor

Prof. Ransmeier teaches courses on Modern China, from the Qing dynasty through the Twentieth Century. Her research explores the relationship between family life and the law in modern China. Current work examines the role of crime in the formation or dissolution of family relationships, as well as the development of legal literacy and a legal imagination in Republican China.

Associate Professor
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Prof. Stanley's research and teaching focus on U.S. history, from the early Republic through the Progressive Era. She is especially interested in the intersections of intellectual, social, and legal history, gender, labor, slavery, and emancipation.

Assistant Professorr
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Thuto Thipe’s research focuses on social and legal history of 19th and 20th century South Africa. She is interested in how changing conceptualisations of, rights to, and uses of land both shape and reflect different imaginings and meanings of race, gender, citizenship, and class. Her manuscript in progress, Black Freehold: Landownership in Alexandra Township, tells the story of the history of land ownership in Alexandra Township, near Johannesburg, from its founding in 1912 to 1979.The disruption that black people’s freehold land ownership in Alexandra caused to white supremacist order drove the South African state to invest enormous financial resources and political capital in dismantling black freehold rights, physically demolishing large parts of the Township, and forcibly moving tens of thousands of people from Alexandra in efforts to destroy the social, political and economic realities that residents produced under freehold.

Keywords: African history; urban studies; legal history; history of race; colonialism and Black freedom struggles

Associate Professor of US History and the College

Gabriel Winant's research and teaching focus on social inequality in American capitalism. He is interested in the relationship between capital accumulation and wage labor in the formal economy on the one hand and, on the other, the strategies for survival and social reproduction pursued through other kinds of social organization—family, neighborhood, community, and so on. He approaches capitalism as a system that is fundamentally racialized and gendered, with complex layers of inequality and multiple dimensions of social conflict. He is currently finishing a book on the transition from manufacturing to service work in the United States, entitled Crucible of Care: The Fall of Manufacturing, the Rise of Health Care, and the Making of a New Working Class.

Hanna Holborn Gray Professor
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Prof. Zahra's field is modern European history with a focus on Central and Eastern Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is particularly interested in the history of migration and displacement; nationalism (and indifference to nationalism); and gender, childhood and the family.

Keywords: family, childhood, nationalism, migration, human rights, globalization

Assistant Research Professor
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Lindsay Gifford’s research focuses on everyday life under the authoritarian state in the Middle East, and Middle Eastern refugee experiences through forced migration trajectories in the region and into the diaspora in the Global North. Professor Gifford has taught in the areas of refugees, forced migration, displacement, Middle Eastern anthropology, and social science research methods.

Assistant Instructional Professor
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Kara Ann Hooser is an Assistant Instructional Professor for the Committee on International Relations. Her research and teaching interests include feminist and postcolonial thought, the Women, Peace, and Security agenda, and the relationship between masculinities and violence. She is currently working on two major projects: queer perspectives in peacebuilding and feminist storytelling in social science research.

Mark and Barbara Fried Professor of Law

Emily Buss's research interests include children's and parents' rights and the legal system's allocation of responsibility for children’s development among parent, child, and state. In recent years, she has focused particular attention on the developmental impact of court proceedings on court-involved children, including foster youth and youth accused of crimes. In addition to courses focused on the subjects of her research, Buss teaches civil procedure, evidence, and family law.

Arnold I. Shure Professor

Among the subjects Prof. Case teaches are feminist jurisprudence, constitutional law, European legal systems, marriage, and regulation of sexuality. While her diverse research interests include German contract law and the First Amendment, her scholarship to date has concentrated on the regulation of sex, gender, and sexuality, and on the early history of feminism.

Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor

Prof. Nussbaum has a particular interest in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, political philosophy, feminism, and ethics, including animal rights.

Senior Lecturer

Sarah Johnson studies social and political thought, particularly since the eighteenth century. Her research and teaching interests include theories and critiques of modernity, the writings of Giambattista Vico and Karl Marx, and the history of economic thought, including the relationship between feminist theory and political economy.

Assistant Professor

Dr. Bermúdez's research interests are around language and its use in the construction of identity, identifications, and racializations. They have extensive experience working with Indigenous people in Central America on expression of verbal art, and otherwise, are interested in describing the construction of gender through linguistic means. They teach courses in the Linguistics Department including Speech Play and Verbal Art; Language, Gender, and Sexuality; Latinxidad; and Field Methods in Linguistic Research.

Professor

My broad interests lie in the area of meaning (semantics), and its relation to linguistic form (morphology and syntax). I am also interested in how sentences are used in context (pragmatics) to produce, and enrich, meaning, as well as questions about the foundations of semantics and philosophy of language (mainly questions regarding truth, belief, and context sensitivity). I have worked on various topics in syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and always within a comparative crosslinguistic perspective, which often includes a lot of typological and variation considerations. My crosslinguistic orientation is partly due to the fact that I am interested in describing the grammar of Greek, my mother tongue, and partly to the fact that I firmly believe that crosslinguistic comparisons are fundamental to our understanding of how grammar works. Besides Greek, I have also worked on Romance (Spanish and Catalan mainly), Germanic languages (German and Dutch), and recently, in joint work, Chinese and Basque. Recently, my interests have also been expanded in two areas: the internal structure (syntax and semantics) of the quantificational noun phrase (which is the source of inspiration for my book, co-edited with Monika Rathert, to appear with Oxford), and psycholinguistics (studying of home sign systems in collaboration with Susan Goldin Meadow and Carolyn Mylander from Psychology.) I am also interested in bilingualism.

Assistant Instructional Professor
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Darrel Chia works on literary and cultural objects within the long 20th century pertaining to Anglophone literatures, trans-oceanic crossings, and postcolonial theory. He is interested in how contact, negotiation, and justification in colonial and post-colonial contexts generate specific aesthetic, ethical, and intimate responses.

Keywords: Anglophone Literature, Critical and Political Theory, Postcolonial Theory, Gender and Sexuality, Intellectual History, Law and Literature, The Novel, Nonfiction Prose

Assistant Instructional Professor, M.A. Program in the Humanities and Department of Art History

Alex Fraser studies 19th- and early-20th century design, aesthetics, art, and decoration. Her teaching and research focus on intimate spaces of domestic life and what they can tell us about shifts in private experience and the challenges of its representation under conditions of global modernity. Currently, her research collects in two areas: first, the domestic interior as a site of artistic experimentation and index of modern experience across 19th-century Europe, and, second, the role of home art collections and the livability of European modernism amidst the transformation of the 20th-century industrial Midwest. Both are informed by broader interests in the interface between intimate, private, or “feminine” aesthetic experience and mass historical change.

Assistant Instructional Professor

My teaching and research center on literary modernism and the culture of modernity in the United States. I am interested in modernist literature, science, and political discourses around gender and sexuality, particularly as these bear on emergent forms of identity, kinship, and social life. More specifically, my work deals, on the one hand, with queer cultural and intimate histories of the early twentieth century and, on the other, with reproductive politics and feminist writings during this period.

Assistant Instructional Professor

Tristan Schweiger's research and teaching focus on the global eighteenth century, including the intersection of constructions of gender and imperial ideology. Presently, he is exploring how class and gender forms are produced through -- and challenge -- emergent capital. In addition to gender theory, his work draws heavily on Marxist analysis and postcolonial theory.

Associate Senior Instructional Professor, Humanities; Director, MAPH
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My teaching and research focuses mainly on questions about how collective life forms (or doesn’t) under capitalism, as well as what life and livable worlds might be beyond or other than those arrangements. For me those questions run through science fiction, which is where my work is located, especially post-1960s SF, feminist SF and utopianism. I teach classes on science fiction and theory, with particular interests in theories of reproduction (biological and social), Marxism, environments and gender. I’ve advised BAs and MAs on many aspects of science fiction and the speculative, including more-than-human relations, embodiment, technology and gender, Indigenous SF, ecology and SF, apocalypse, utopia and Octavia Butler.

Earl S. Johnson Instructor in Anthropology
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Yasmin Cho is an Earl S. Johnson Instructor in Anthropology in MAPSS. She holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Duke University. Before joining MAPSS, she was a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Copenhagen.

Yasmin’s research interests include materiality, infrastructure, technology, ethnic politics, migration, gender, and anthropology of religion, as well as social theory and ethnography. Her areas of focus are China, Tibet, and sub-Saharan regions of Africa where China’s transnational presence is growing. Her work is dedicated to understanding, from an anthropological perspective, the role of materiality (including technology and infrastructure) in religious movements, with a special focus on gender politics and the formation of political subjectivity in ethnic minority groups. Her first book, Politics of Tranquility: The Material and Mundane Lives of Buddhist Nuns in Post-Mao Tibet, forthcoming from Cornell University Press, explores the intersections of material practices, gender, and religious revivalism through the lives of Tibetan Buddhist nuns in post-Mao China and reveals the unexpected political outcomes of the nuns’ lives and practices within a restrictive political context.

Since 2021, Yasmin has been focusing on a Chinese-supported Buddhist NGO and its school-building activities in sub-Saharan African countries and recently completed two and a half years of field research in Namibia (including a few months in Madagascar). Her forthcoming article, “Mooring Buddhism: Infrastructure and Chinese School Building in Central Namibia,” in The Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies reflects her most recent ethnographic work in Namibia and explores how Buddhism has become a form of infrastructure that supports China’s growing presence on the African continent. Her other publications have appeared in the Journal of Religious Ethics, Modern Asian Studies, and the edited volume Frontier Tibet: Patterns of Change in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands.

Keywords: Materiality, Infrasturcture, Technology, Ethnic Politics, Gender, Religion, Buddhism

Assistant Senior Instructional Professor
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Tori Gross is Earl S. Johnson Instructor in Anthropology at the Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University and her research interests include the politics of affect and emotion, gendered performances of status, and negotiations of parastate sovereignty in the context of India’s young democracy. Tori's first book manuscript examines the relationships between populist reason, anxious articulations of masculinity, and competitive intercaste violence in contemporary South India. She teaches courses on power and resistance, status and performance, and processes of collective self making.

Director

Dr. Heuring’s research and teaching interests include the social and cultural history of nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain and its empire, colonialism and decolonization, the colonial Caribbean, the history of gender and sexuality, and the history of medicine and public health. Her research focuses on reproductive rights, public health, and anti-colonial nationalism in early twentieth-century Jamaica.

Earl S Johnson Instructor of History
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Deirdre Lyons is an Earl S. Johnson Instructor of History in the MAPSS program. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago, an MA in History and an MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago, and a BA in History from New York University. She has held postdoctoral and research fellowships from, among other institutions, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, the John Carter Brown Library, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the University of Chicago, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and a Fulbright U.S. Student fellowship.

Dr. Lyons’s research focuses on the history of gender, family, and racial politics before and after the second abolition of slavery in the French Antilles in 1848. Her book manuscript-in-progress draws on several years of archival research in France, Martinique, and Guadeloupe to examine the intimate, gendered lives of enslaved and freed peoples who helped to shape the contours of slavery and emancipation, while shedding new light on how French antislavery reformers, colonial authorities, and planters tried to remake a post-slavery society by disciplining and reforming the family lives of the laboring populations. At its core, Dr. Lyons’ project illuminates how the family became a site of contestation over freedom’s limits before and after slavery in Martinique and Guadeloupe. Her work also reveals how enslaved and freed people—especially women—created cultural and social familial institutions in bondage and in freedom that served as survival strategies, a means of establishing autonomy, and as spaces from which they could counteract exploitation.

In addition to her research, Dr. Lyons has engaged in several public-facing history projects, including co-curating a special exhibition at the Haitian American Museum of Chicago and consulting on policy research for anti-human trafficking NGO’s.

Select Publications:
Lyons, Deirdre. ""'They Are Free with Me' Enslaved and Freed Women's Antislavery Lawsuits in the French Antilles, 1830-1848."" French Historical Studies, Vol. 47, no. 3 (August 2024): 365-397.

Keywords: gender and family, slavery and abolition, Caribbean, French empire, Atlantic World

Assistant Instructional Professor

Dr. Painia’s current research focuses on the intersection of race, gender, and religious identity amongst Southern Black religious women. More broadly, Dr. Painia’s scholarship looks at the maintenance and redefinition of Back femininities and masculinities in religious and community spaces.

Assistant Instructional Professor in Political Science
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Andrew Proctor is an Assistant Instructional Professor of Political Science in the Masters of Arts Program in the Social Sciences. His current book project “Coming out to vote: The political construction of sexuality and gender” examines how LGBT political identities and group boundaries are constructed through interactions between activists and political parties in American politics. Dr. Proctor teaches courses on identity politics, LGBT politics in the United States, and research methods.

Associate Instructional Professor in Anthropology
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Ella Wilhoit is an associate instructional professor in Anthropology. Ella’s research examines gendered navigations of rural labor and status. She is particularly interested in gendered and racialized displacement and ecological violence, and her work highlights 'invisible,' gendered labors--productive, reproductive, and environmental--encouraged by (I)NGO projects and transnational trade policy among other influences. While her work has long been based in the Andes, her latest project brings interests in displacement, political division, ecological devastation and gendered and racialized struggles for economic stability to the Southeast US. Her research in development examines more-than-human webs of interdependence in agricultural communities and back to the land movements, focusing particularly on 21st century experiences of tenancy, expressions of rural masculinity, and the diversity of rural political consciousness. Ella teaches Gender and Popular Culture, Ethnographies of Sex and Gender, and More than Human Ethnography among other courses.

Keywords: Gender, Labor, Rural, Latin America, Multispecies

Assistant Professor

I am an ethnomusicologist whose work centers issues of postcolonial development and temporal experience. My first book project, Island Time: Speed, Music, and Modernity in St. Kitts and Nevis is about the sonic manifestations of global acceleration within Eastern Caribbean music practices, especially as they pertain to the discourse surrounding dancing black women and girls. My second project focuses on the sonic strategies of black neurodivergent women and representations of neurodivergence, particularly ADHD, in popular music.

Mabel Greene Myers Professor

Prof. Feldman is a cultural historian of European vernacular musics, ca. 1500–1950, with a concentration on Italy. Her projects have explored the senses and sensibilities of listeners, the interplay of myth, festivity, and kingship in opera, issues of cinema, media, and voice, issues of performance, and various incarnations of the musical artist. Her recent work deals with the life and afterlife of the castrato phenomenon in Rome, including in cinema, literature, psychoanalysis.

Assistant Professor
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Paula Clare Harper is a musicologist who researches music, sound, and the internet. She is interested in putting digital ephemera and oddities into broader context, in hearing the musicality of online meme cultures, and in tracking music’s creation and circulation across digital platforms and communities. She teaches courses on music and sound in digital culture, popular music, and gender and music videos; her current book projects include Viral Musicking and the Rise of Noisy Platforms, a musical history of going viral online, and Taylor Swift: The Star, The Songs, The Fans, an academic volume on the pop singer-songwriter, which she is co-editing.

Keywords: Virality, digital platforms, media and mediation, circulation, sound studies, gender, fandom

Associate Professor

I am a scholar of (electronic) music, sound studies, and disability studies. Right now, I am especially interested in synthesizers, in how electronic sounds circulate, and in how cultural value is produced around them. I’m writing a book called Porous Instruments: Race, Gender, and Circulation in Electronic Sound.

Associate Professor

My current book project explores gender and cultural translation in the devotional songs of the Bene Israel, a Marathi-speaking Jewish people from western India. I am particularly interested in how Bene Israel women have asserted community authority by (re)claiming repertories abandoned by men, emigres, and other religious communities.

Mabel Greene Myers Professor

Prof. Bashkin's research interests include Arab intellectual history, modern Iraqi history and the history of Arab-Jews in Iraq and Israel.

Associate Professor of Modern Arabic Literature
she/her/hers

I am a scholar of the literary and cultural formations of identity in the modern Arab Middle East (19thC - present). Trained in comparative literature, my research is situated at the intersection of literary and cultural studies, critical geography and urban studies, history, and gender studies. I combine theoretical approaches to space-making, affect, identity formation, and cultural production to demonstrate how the local dynamics of everyday life intersect with the larger dynamics of global migration flows in shaping national identity and to uncover the emotions that different kinds of imaginary spaces evoke. My research projects trace how claims of belonging to urban spaces unsettle dominant paradigms of the nation and of the trauma of war; how the intersections of diaspora and race complicate colonial geographies and axes, and, in parallel, how literary texts shaped gender identities as the Arabic prose novel was developing in the nineteenth century.

Keywords: critical geography, migration and diaspora studies, urban studies, affect studies

Assistant Professor of Sumerology
she/her/hers
On leave 2024-25

Prof. Matuszak is a Sumerologist with a research and teaching focus on editing, translating, and analyzing Sumerian literature, which was composed and transmitted from 2600 BCE through the first two centuries of the Common Era in region corresponding to modern Iraq. Her work combines philological basic research with analytical methods derived from literary and cultural studies, leading her to explore problems of grammar and lexicography just as much as questions related to gender, law, and religion. Her first monograph entitled “Und du, du bist eine Frau?!” (And you, you are a woman?!; De Gruyter 2021) presents the first edition and in-depth analysis of a literary debate between two women composed around 4000 years ago. She is currently working on a book project entitled Parodying Songs of Praise exploring Sumerian mock hymns as a hitherto unrecognized genre, along with a second monograph entitled Defining Femininity: The Construction of Ideal Women in Sumerian Didactic Literature at the Dawn of the 2nd Millennium BCE, which introduces the world’s oldest literary discourse on gender and seeks to engage scholars beyond her field.

Keywords: Sumerology, Sumerian Language

Professor

Prof. Roth researches and publishes on the legal and social history of the ancient Near East. Her primary interests have been on family law and on women's legal and social issues, and on the compilation and transmission law norms. Currently, she is working on a project on Mesopotamian law cases.

Professor
they/them

Ray Briggs is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. They study on the metaphysics and epistemology of gender, and they are also interested in time, causation, probability, . They are the co-author with B.R. George of What Even Is Gender? (2023, Routledge), and one of the hosts of the syndicated radio program Philosophy Talk. They received their PhD from MIT in 2009, and have held academic positions at the University of Sydney, the Australian National University, The University of Queensland, and Stanford University.

Keywords: trans philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology

Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor

Prof. Nussbaum has a particular interest in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, political philosophy, feminism, and ethics, including animal rights.

David B. and Clara E. Stern Professor

Prof. Vogler's research interests are in practical philosophy (particularly the strand of work in moral philosophy indebted to Elizabeth Anscombe), practical reason, Kant's ethics, Marx, and neo-Aristotelian naturalism. She has published essays in ethics, social and political philosophy, philosophy and literature, cinema, psychoanalysis, gender studies, sexuality studies, and other areas.

D. Gale Johnson Distinguished Service Professor

Prof. Cohen's general field of specialization is American politics, although her research interests include African-American politics, women and politics, lesbian and gay politics, and social movements.

Assistant Professor
she/her/hers

Rochelle Terman studies international norms, gender, and advocacy, with a focus on the Muslim world. Her current book project, Backlash: Defiance, Human Rights, and the Politics of Shame, investigates counter-productive consequences of global “naming and shaming” campaigns.

Mary R. Morton Distinguished Service Professor

Prof. Wedeen specializes in comparative politics, the Middle East, political theory, and feminist theory. She is currently working on a book about ideological interpellation, neoliberal autocracy, and generational change in present-day Syria.

Charles E. Merriam Distinguished Professor
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Prof. Zerilli's research subjects range across feminist thought, the politics of language, aesthetics, democratic theory, and Continental philosophy. Her current book project is titled Towards a Democratic Theory of Judgment.

Assistant Professor
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Lin Bian is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology. Her research focuses on understanding the developmental roots of group-based inequality (e.g., gender gap in STEM) and developing theoretically grounded interventions to promote social justice. In this vein, she has pursued three major lines of research: One line of work focuses on the cognitive mechanisms, the developmental trajectory and the consequences of stereotypes about gender and race. A second line of work focuses on early expectations of people’s obligations or duties within and across social groups. A third line of work explores children’s understanding of social hierarchy and how these beliefs interact with their reasoning about group membership.

Assistant Professor
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Lydia Emery is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology. Her research focuses on romantic relationships, and specifically on the links among relationships, social class, and the self. She studies how social class contexts shape people’s relationships, and how people’s self-concepts both influence and are influenced by their relationships.

Keywords: Close Relationships, Social Class, the Self

Director of CGS, 1996–1999

Associate Chair, Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity, Arthur and Joann Rasmussen Professor of Western Civilization in the College, and Professor of Modern European Social History in the History Department and Professor in the Department of RDI
she/her/hers

I am a scholar of the politics of everyday life, with a particular focus on gender, race, religion, material culture and everyday life. My expertise lies in Europe and the Atlantic World in the Modern period.

Keywords: gender, race, religion, Europe, Atlantic World

Associate Professor

Professor Brown specializes in American and African-American cultural production in the 20th century. Her current work explores the relationships between architecture, race, and narrative forms.

Assistant Instructional Professor
she/her/hers

Keywords: Visual culture, performance, comedy, gender, masculinities, Islam, religion, secularism

D. Gale Johnson Distinguished Service Professor

Prof. Cohen's general field of specialization is American politics, although her research interests include African-American politics, women and politics, lesbian and gay politics, and social movements.

Associate Professor
she/her/hers

Eve L. Ewing uses multi-genre storytelling, tools of sociological inquiry, archives, and community-grounded epistemologies to interrogate racialized histories and imagine emancipatory possibilities. Working through the lenses of Afrofuturism, Black feminism, and Du Boisian sociology, Prof. Ewing attempts to situate cultural organizing, the praxis of care, and relational accountability at the foundations of her scholarship. A former public school teacher, she is particularly interested in the role of schools as social institutions and in the ways that schools can construct, normalize, and reinforce forms of social inequality, the ways that educational inequities reflect social cruelties beyond the walls of the school building, as well as, conversely, the still-lingering possibility that educational spaces can be sites of joy and liberation.

Keywords: race, education, Black feminism, Afrofuturism

Professor
he/him/his
On leave 2024-25

Prof. Snorton is a cultural theorist who analyzes representations of race and gender throughout the 19th-21st centuries. He is the author of Nobody Is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) and Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), He is currently working on a book about swamps, tentatively entitled, Mud: Ecologies of Racial Meaning.

Neubauer Family Associate Professor

Prof. Atkinson's research interests are in architecture and urban history in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Italy. Situated primarily in Italy, his current scholarship considers the social dimensions of architecture through a series of research themes derived from his interest in the historical understanding of urban experience.

Assistant Professor of Spanish Literature; Academic Careers Adviser

Larissa Brewer-García specializes in colonial Latin American studies, with a focus on cultural productions of the Caribbean and Andes and the African diaspora in the Iberian empire. Within these areas, her research and teaching interests include the relationship between literature and law, genealogies of race and racism, humanism and Catholicism in the early modern Atlantic, and translation studies. Her current book project, Beyond Babel: Translation and the Making of Blackness in Colonial Spanish America, examines the influence of black interpreters and go-betweens in the creation and circulation of notions of blackness in writings from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish America. She is also working on Saints’ Lives of the Early Black Atlantic, a translation and critical edition of hagiographies of individuals of African descent written in Spanish from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Associate Professor of Latin American and Latinx Studies
he/him/his

Sergio Delgado Moya's teaching and research include Latin American and Latinx literatures and cultures from the 20th and 21st century. His first book, Delirious Consumption (University of Texas Press, 2017), analyzed poetry and visual artworks produced in Mexico and Brazil in the decades after WWII. His current research studies crime tabloids and other sensationalist publications as platforms for the dissemination of categories of others, such as the poor, the criminal, the miserable, the deviant, the female, the effeminate, the backward, the demonic, the unkempt, and so forth. Current and future course offerings include: a course on Chicanx literature and culture, courses on the US-Mexico borderlands, a seminar on radical women artists in Latin America, and a seminar on gay power and queer potency in the Americas.

Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality
Professor
she/her/hers

I have long been interested in how literature shapes individual readers, as well as broader social and culture practices and beliefs. Engaging with literary works can offer readers (at least) two important opportunities: the possibility to cultivate and practice empathy, and a window into the contested and dynamic nature of collective identity formation. Many students (indeed, many non-medievalists) find the Middle Ages very alien. In my work I seek to reveal the complexity and richness of works from a period that is often characterized as violent or backward, or in which the sharp edges of ideological conflict have been effaced by time, leaving an impression of homogeneity of belief.

Assistant Professor of French Literature
she/her/hers
On leave 2024-25

Pauline Goul is Assistant Professor of French Literature at the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, and an affiliate in the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization. She is writing a book, entitled Ecologies of Waste, on the environmental anxieties that appear in sixteenth century French literature around the discovery and conquest of the New World. Her work in environmental criticism naturally leads to ecofeminisms, the topic of her next book project, which will explore early modern ecofeminisms - that is, the intricate relationship between women and the natural world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Her teaching interests have recently included fairy tales written by women (notably in the seventeenth century), insurrections as a French idea, and an exploration of race, gender and religion as lenses through which to read early modern texts differently.

Keywords: early modern France, ecocriticism, ecofeminism

Professor of French
she/her/hers

I work on twentieth- and twenty-first-century French and Francophone literature, with a focus on the social and collective meanings of literary forms. My teaching and research interests include experimental writing, theories and representations of everyday life, and chance and contingency in literature. My most recent book, The Documentary Imagination in Twentieth-Century French Literature (Oxford UP, 2020) traces the emergence of a documentary impulse that shapes literature’s relationship to visual representation, testimonial discourses, and autobiographical narrative. My current research turns to more recent literary production, exploring shifting conceptions and uses of fictionality in the last three decades. This work engages with issues of gender and sexuality in autobiography, autofiction, and other forms of life writing. As a CSGS affiliate, I have taught in the Gender and Sexuality in World Civilizations sequence as well as a seminar on Gender and Work in the 19th and 20th centuries, and I have advised students working on French feminism and on gender-inclusive language reform in France.

Associate Professor

Prof. Lugo-Ortiz is a specialist in nineteenth-century Latin American literature, and in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Caribbean cultural history. Her work focuses on questions concerning the relationships between cultural production and the formation of modern socio-political identities. She is also the author of numerous essays that address the interconnections between queer sexualities, gender and anti-colonial politics in twentieth-century Puerto Rico.

Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies
he/him/his

I work mainly on North African literature in relation to political, cultural, and social debates in the region. My research interests include North African feminism, women's writings from the region, and the discussions about feminism, Islam, and modernity, particularly in the context of North Africa and the Middle East.

Keywords: North African feminism

Professor

Prof. Maggi's scholarship includes works on Renaissance and baroque culture, literature, and philosophy with particular focus on treatises on love, religious texts, and the relationship of word and image. He is also an expert of Christian mysticism, with works on medieval, Renaissance, and baroque women mystics. His latest works are a book on the modern poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini and an edited volume on Petrarch.

Associate Professor of Modern Italian Literature
she/her/hers
On leave 2024-25

I am a specialist of Modern Italian Literature (19th- 21st Century), and memory and form are at the heart of my scholarship. The relationship between memory and form is declined in a variety of ways in my publications, which range from autobiography to Holocaust testimony, from fictional accounts of historical catastrophes to meditations on one’s own terminal illness. In all these writings, I am concerned with a network of recurring problems: the structural equivalence between the activity of telling a story and memory’s ability to shape time; the unsettling relationship between testimony and survival; the artistic representations of historical catastrophes—and the ethics of such representations; the narrative shape of personal traumas; and the limit cases of what can be thought and shown.

Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies
she/her/hers

My research revolves around contemporary Francophone literatures of oceans, archipelagoes and migrations. My current research asks: What happens if we read contemporary stories of oceans and archipelagos against the grain, by focusing not on human protagonists, but rather by tracing the trajectories of those that biologist Nancy Knowlton calls “citizens of the sea,” such as corals, eels and turtles? These aquatic beings are often overlooked by literary criticism. However, my monograph proposes that learning from these creatures allows us to develop new understandings of oceanic “complicities” – that is, the complex and often ambiguous ways in which human beings, marine species, and archipelagic environments are imbricated within each other. I argue that such understandings are key to addressing the most pressing challenges of our time, from the collective trauma of enslavement to the devastating impacts of climate change.

Keywords: Oceans; Archipelagoes; Global South; Postcolonial Literatures; Blanks of History

Assistant Instructional Professor in Catalan and Spanish
they/them/theirs

Bel Olid's current research centers in non-binary language, non-binary identities in literature and how these identities affect literary language and expression. Also a literary author, their short story collection Wilder Winds (Fum d'Estampa Press, 2022) and their essay on aesthetic pressure Hairless (Polity Books, 2022) have just been translated into English.

Keywords: inclusive language, queer studies, non-binarity, literature, language teaching

Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in Latin American Literature
she/her/hers

My research focuses on performance, race, gender and sexuality in Latin America and the Caribbean in the 21st century. My work engages questions of racial impersonation in performance and visual art and its relationship to discourses of mestizaje and non-racialism in the region.

Associate Professor
he/him/his

Prof. Steinberg's scholarship focuses on medieval Italian literature, especially on Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, the early lyric, manuscript culture, and literary historiography. His interests include the intersection of legal and literary culture and the history of the book.

Director of the Italian Language Program; Languages Across the Curriculum Coordinator; Senior Instructional Professor
she/her/hers

Veronica Vegna’s scholarship and research interests center on Italian cinema, organized crime, and language and culture acquisition. Her book Donne, mafia e cinema: una prospettiva interdisciplinare (Ravenna: Longo Editore, 2017) is a critical study of gender roles and the representation of the Sicilian mafia in contemporary Italian cinema.

Associate Professor and Chair
she/her/hers

Anne Eakin Moss is a scholar of modern Russophone literature and culture in the Russian Empire and the former Soviet Union, with additional specialties in film studies and gender theory. Her research focuses on the relationship between art, ideology, and power, especially as it pertains to gender, and as inflected by the history of revolutionary thought in the Russian Empire and the aftermath of the establishment of the Soviet Union. Her book Only Among Women: Philosophies of Community in the Russian Imagination, 1860–1940 (Northwestern 2020, Russian translation by NLO 2022) examines the radical place of women’s relations in Russian literature and cinema. Her articles on Soviet aesthetics and cultural history have appeared in journals including Public Culture, Screen, Film History, Die Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung, and Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema. She has also written about gender and the essay film as well as on contemporary documentary cinema.

Keywords: feminist film theory; gender and sexuality in the novel; gender and documentary cinema

Professor
she/her/hers

Over the years, Prof. Shallcross' research interests have evolved from the focus on the verbal-visual interrelationship through the questions of identity, in particular, those manifested in diverse modes of habitation to a discourse on objects and material culture.

Keywords: materiality, embodied gender strategies during the Holocaust, Concentration camps and sexuality

Associate Professor, Slavic; Chair, Fundamentals
Use my name

My work on gender and sexuality abides in spaces where the uneasy tension between its essentialist and constructivist discourses dwells and so it is mass culture phantasies, especially as these are mediatized in horror and thriller films, manga, and objects (toys, decor, chachkies). This research has so far focused on narratives and enactments of transgender "monstrosity," child sexuality, and rape and rape revenge. My work also looks to canonical literature and art—and these also vis-à-vis their popular imaginaries. Here I concentrate on the work of Vladimir Nabokov, (global) Surrealism, and the theory and fiction of Georges Bataille.

William Rainey Harper Professor

Prof. Clemens works at the intersection of political, organizational, and historical sociology. Her past research addressed the role of social movements and voluntary organizations in processes of institutional change. Her 1997 book The People's Lobby was based on comparisons of labor, agrarian, and women's associations. Her current research addresses how formal political institutions structure organizational fields in the context of both state expansion and contemporary policies of privatization. Prof. Clemens is now completing a book that traces the tense but powerful entanglements of benevolence and liberalism in the development of the American nation-state.

Associate Professor, Director of Global Studies

Prof. Hoang’s research interests center on sociology of gender, economic sociology, globalization, law, and qualitative research methods. Dr. Hoang is the author of, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work (2015) published by the University of California Press. A central focus of this book is to understand the gendered dynamics of deal brokering in Southeast Asia. Her current book project Playing in the Gray forthcoming with Princeton University Press looks at offshoring and foreign investments in frontier markets. Full bio: www.kimberlykayhoang.com

Associate Professor
she/her/hers
On leave 2024-25

Kristen Schilt's research interests center on sociology of gender and sexualities, the sociology of culture, and the sociology of work and occupations. A central focus of her work is finding new ways to make visible the taken-for-granted cultural assumptions about gender and sexuality that serve to naturalize and reproduce social inequality.

Professor

Prof. Trinitapoli works at the intersection of social demography and the sociology of religion, with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Her current work is concerned with sexual and reproductive health, including fertility, and cultural change.

Keywords: family, population, reproductive health, religion

Lucy Flower Professor

Prof. Waite's research interests include social demography, aging, the family, health, working families, the link between biology, psychology and the social world. Her current research focuses on the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP), a study which has at its core a national survey of older adults first interviewed in 2005 and 2006.

Associate Professor

Prof. Ebeling's research interests include modern and classical Tamil language and literature, in particular nineteenth-century literary culture, South Indian cultures, religion in Angkorean Cambodia, and comparative literary studies. Currently he is working on two book projects: a history of the present moment in contemporary Tamil writing, mapping the genealogies of contemporary Tamil literary production from a global perspective; and a monograph with the working title The Imperial Rise of the Novel, which will address the connections between Western imperialism, Asian modernities and the global history of the novel, discussing a wide range of texts from Europe and Asia (India, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia).

George V. Bobrinskoy Professor

Prof. Majumdar's interests span histories of Indian cinema, gender and marriage in colonial India, and Indian intellectual thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is currently engaged in two projects: a history of the film society movement in India from 1947 to 1977, and an intellectual history of key concepts such as society, civility, and civilization in the Hindu and Muslim Bengali contexts during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Professor; Director of Graduate Studies

Professor Stark specializes in modern Hindi literature and South Asian book history. Her research and teaching focus on the cultural and intellectual history of North India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with an emphasis on print culture, gender, and education. Her work addresses the production of textbook and advice literature for women as well as social reform efforts directed at women. Her current work explores missionary print and the coming of the book in nineteenth-century rural India.

Associate Professor of the Practice in the Arts

Prof Buxbaum serves as the Director of Undergraduate Studies in TAPS. She works primarily as a theater director, writer and creator, bringing together different performance languages (dance-theater, circus-theater, clown-theater, music-theater). She often teaches mixed format courses that move between seminar and studio practice, with a focus on embodied and arts-based research.

Senior Instructional Professor

Heidi Coleman is the Director of Undergraduate Studies and Performance Programs for Theater and Performance Studies, as well and the Founder/Director of Chicago Performance Lab. She has worked professionally as a director and dramaturg in New York City and San Francisco as well as Chicago. She has collaborated with Anne Bogart, Andrei Serban, Tina Landau, Frank Galati, and Tony Kushner; taught in Columbia University’s Theater MFA and English departments; and has most recently participated in Steppenwolf’s First Look Series. At the University she continuously participates in arts initiatives including the planning and completion of the Reva and David Logan Arts Center. Her work focuses on the integration of theory and practice, in both artistic and programmatic arenas, with a lifelong dedication to new work development.

Associate Professor
she/her/hers (any pronouns are fine)
On leave 2024-25

Dr. Post’s scholarship is preoccupied with minoritarian aesthetics and racial performativity, especially (though not exclusively) in black American culture. She explores the ways that minoritized subjects work with or against the expectations that surround their race, as well as other aspects of their embodiment (gender, dis/ability, and so forth), in literature, visual culture, fine art, theater, and movement.

Keywords: black studies, performance studies, cultural studies, queer of color critique

Professor

Prof. Letinsky's research and artistic interests include the artistic practice of black and white and color photography, feminist issues of representation and identity in mainstream genres—in particular romance, erotica, and pornography—land visual cultures of art and cinema.

Assistant Professor

Phillips’ artistic practice is framed by intellectual interests in psychoanalytic and Black feminist thought, as well as Postcolonial questions and issues of social Belonging. Her research includes an examination of power dynamics within interpersonal relationships, and their reflection of larger systemic socio-political struggles.
www.juliaphillips.org

Julia Phillips, Penetrator (#3), 2017, salt glazed ceramics, metal pedestal, courtesy: the artist