Alejandra Vela-Martínez
Assistant Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures (Spanish)
Specializations:
20th-21st Century Mexican Cultural Studies
Transnational mass culture, archives, feminine periodicals and literature
Diasporic and border feminine literature
their reception and preservation throughout Latin American Modernity
Course idea:
Open to collaborating on a topic related to formations of identity and/or popular culture
My research critically examines the construction of symbolic value in Latin American literature and culture, with a particular focus on Mexico, through the lens of Gender, Women, and Sexualities Studies. I explore the creation of symbolic capital using two main approaches: historical research based on archival work with understudied materials, and critical readings informed by reception theory and affect theory to highlight biases in cultural consumption. My analyses question the institutionalized margins of official culture from a gendered perspective.
As a whole, my research questions the Latin American cultural field by examining how different "counter-archives," as I call them in my current book manuscript, illuminate literary and cultural history involving feminine writers and materials. I defend the need, within the Humanities, to celebrate the ways femininity has intervened in the public sphere, while rethinking the limits of what is considered Literature and Culture. This is a necessary step towards a reconceptualization of intellectual history based on feminized aesthetics that uncover numerous female and women writers, editors, and readers formerly excluded from the canon.
My interests lie at the intersection of Literary History, Women and Gender Studies, and the History of Material Culture. I challenge prevailing feminist historical perspectives that dismiss cultural products as too conservative or patriarchal, advocating for the recognition of diverse forms of feminine participation in the public sphere throughout history. This approach seeks to restore the agency of women and other feminine subjects in shaping their destinies.
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Andrés Henao Castro
Assistant Professor, Political Science, UMass Boston
Specializations:
My research seeks to rethink the relationship between politics and aesthetics in relation to gender-differentiated colonial logics of capitalist accumulation. While focused on that question, I also want to reimagine the relationship between ancient and contemporary political theory, via the prisms of decolonial theory, critical theory, psychoanalysis, settler colonial critique, Marxism, queer of color critique, critical race theory, and poststructuralism.
Course idea:
None specified
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Patricia Davis
Associate Professor, Media & Design, Northeastern
Specializations:
Memory
Race
Gender
Representation
Visual culture
Material culture
Corporeality
Media studies
Course idea:
Memory and Gender: this course will explore the ways in which women have used various modes of historical production to represent their experiences of and perspectives on the past. It will include studies of women's performance, visual and material culture, filmmaking, literature, and other forms of memory work.
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K.J. Rawson
Associate Professor, English, Northeastern University
Specializations:
Digital humanities
Rhetoric
LGBTQ+ and Feminist Studies
Archives
Course idea:
None specified
K.J. Rawson is founder and director of the Digital Transgender Archive, an award-winning online repository of trans-related historical materials, and he is the co-chair of the editorial board of the Homosaurus, an international LGBTQ linked data vocabulary.
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Stacey Sloboda
Associate Professor, Art, Umass boston
Specializations:
18th Century Art
Architecture and Design History
Cross-cultural context and imperialism
Cultural geography
Women and art patronage
Course idea:
None specified
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Hillary Chute
Distinguished Professor, English, Northeastern University
Specializations:
Visual culture and feminisms
Comics and graphic narratives
Contemporary literature
Course idea:
None specified
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Denise Khor
Associate Professor, Asian American Studies & Visual Studies and Associate Director, Asian American Studies
Specializations:
Film and Media History
Early Cinema
Nontheatrical Exhibition
Photography and Visual Culture
Asian American and Critical Ethnic Studies
Course idea:
None specified
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Rani Neutill
Lecturer, Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Harvard University
Specializations:
Asian American Literature and Film
WOC memoir
Creative nonfiction
Course idea:
Gender and Sexuality in Asian American Literature and Film - This course examines works across a range of genres by Asian-American writers, focusing on the intersection of race, gender formation, and sexuality. We will put conceptions of feminism, queerness, and LGBT identity in conversations about ethnicity, citizenship, power, activism, art and politics, representation, race and resistance and collective as well as individual histories. As a class that focuses on film and literature, we will close read texts as a means to discuss the politics of representation, how a text can inform the world and vice versa. In this class, we will create a space of community forged by respect and the understanding that marginalized voices have been historically de-centered. We will focus on the diversity of Asian American stories and move away from generalized, romanticized, and essentialized notions of Asian American identities.
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Wan Tang
Assistant Professor, Hispanic Studies, Boston College
Specializations:
19th-21st-century Spain
the Spanish Civil War
Contemporary Spanish literature and visual culture
The fantastic and Gothic fiction
Monster theory
Aging studies, television studies, critical race and migration studies
The Asian diaspora
Course idea:
None specified
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Paula Austin
Assistant Professor, African American Studies, Boston University
Specializations:
Black studies/US history
Black women's history
Urban history
Childhood studies/history
History of social sciences
Social movement history in the US
Course idea:
None specified
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Suzanne Leonard
Professor, English & Critical Race, Gender, and Cultural Studies, Simmons University
suzanne.leonard@simmons.edu
Specializations:
American film and television studies
Feminist media studies
Women's literature, gender and cultural theory
Literary interpretation
20th and 21st century American literature
Course idea:
None specified
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Kristin Peterson
Assistant Professor, Communication, Boston College
Specializations:
Religion
Digital media
Feminist activism
Religious representation and the media
Course idea:
None specified
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Amey Victoria Adkins Jones
Assistant Professor, Theology; African and African Diaspora Studies, Boston College
Specializations:
Mariology
Sexual Ethics
Race and Gender
Black Feminist/Womanist Theology
Religious Visual Culture
Human Trafficking
Prison Industrial Complex
Course idea:
Non specified
Amey Victoria Adkins-Jones ("AVA") is Assistant Professor of Theology and African and African Diaspora Studies at Boston College.
Her scholarship specializes in Mariology and womanist/black feminist thought.
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Phyllis Thompson
Lecturer on Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Harvard University
Specializations:
Domesticity
Representations
Food
Motherhood
American studies
Course idea:
Selfies (history of self-portraits in visual culture & literature, regulation of gender therein; visual cultures of the body; representation as a site of protest)
Phyllis Thompson is a cultural historian who works on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American topics. Her book project, Domestic Pleasures: Dreams of Hope and Fulfillment in American Home Life, traces the intellectual history of the idea of pleasure in private life. It focuses on representations of gendered pleasure as they circulated in literary, prescriptive, and popular texts and images during a pair of Gilded Ages a century apart. A second project addresses the development of taste as a transatlantic phenomenon, with a particular focus on taste-makers and their evolving qualifications.
She received her doctorate in American Studies, with a graduate certificate in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, from Harvard University. She additionally holds an A.M. in History from Harvard, an M.A. in American Civilization from Brown University, and a B.A. in English Literature from Yale University. From 2013-2014 she was the Visiting Scholar in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Northeastern University.
Thompson maintains active research interests in representations of gender, race, and class; the body; the family and domesticity; childhood; the intellectual histories of love and beauty; food; DIY culture; the relationship between text and image; the history of sexuality and gender; and gender politics. Before her academic career she worked as an editor of photography books at Aperture Foundation in New York City.
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Colleen Kiely
Professor, Arts and Music Simmons University
Professor, Art
Specializations:
Studio Art Practice
Course idea:
A studio art drawing class could pair well with themes of perception, cognition, mindfulness, embodiment, visual culture, gender, etc. providing a different, yet complimentary, experiential approach to theory-based learning.
Colleen Kiely is Professor of Art and has taught studio art courses at Simmons College since 2005. In addition to her regular rotation of courses, Kiely designed a unique upper level studio seminar for Simmons titled "Looking at Herself: Contemporary Women Artists and the Female Body". This course focuses on contemporary figuration by women artists in all media, exploring issues of gender and feminist art practices. Prior to joining Simmons, she taught at institutions including Bowdoin College, Massachusetts College of Art, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Northeastern University and Montserrat College of Art.
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Lynne Byall Benson
Lecturer of Women's and Gender Studies, UMass Boston
Specializations:
- History of women’s education
- Women and the media
Course idea:
None specified
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Sandy Alexandre
Professor of Law, Northeastern University
Specializations:
African-American Literature and Culture
African Diaspora Studies
Historicism
Digital Humanities
Course idea:
None specified
Sandy Alexandre’s research spans the late nineteenth-century to present-day black American literature and culture. Her first book, The Properties of Violence: Claims to Ownership in Representations of Lynching (Mississippi 2012), uses the history of American lynching violence as a framework to understand matters concerning displacement, property ownership, and the American pastoral ideology in a literary context. For example, in one chapter—on Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987)—she asks readers to consider the gendered implications of seeing lynching iconography itself as a form of owned property.
Sandy Alexandre is currently writing another book, Up From Chattels: Thinghood in an Ethics of Black Curation, which will take as its point of departure the premise that the former, enforced condition of black Americans as fungible merchandise can haunt, inform, and morally energize, to some extent, their very own relationships to material objects. This book will explore how some black Americans create what Alexandre calls a “culture of significance” with material objects. Using literary analysis, studying material artifacts, and engaging the work of black collectors, Alexandre argues that this improvised, curated, and eventually sacralized culture of subject-object relations constitutes an immanent critique of consumer capitalism. To think truly analytically about black-American material culture without resorting hastily to jeremiads about the so-called irreparable and vitiating influence of “bling bling” on that culture is to grant the possibility that, based on the sobering history and memory of black thinghood, some black Americans do engage in a practice of subject-object relations that can be, at once, political, ecological, spiritual and aesthetic. Overall, Alexandre’s work takes into serious account the ways in which an ecology comprised of people, places, and things can, at once, reverberate and attempt to negotiate the various instances of racial violence that mark the aggregate of U.S. history.