Nick Montfort
Professor and Poet, Comparative Media Studies and Writing, MIT
Nick Montfort develops computational poetry and art and has participated in dozens of literary and academic collaborations. Recent books include The Future and Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities (MIT Press) and several books of computational poetry: Hard West Turn, The Truelist, #!, the collaboration 2x6, and Autopia. He has worked to contribute to platform studies, critical code studies, and electronic literature.
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Specializations:
Digital Media
Course idea:
To guest lecture and discuss digital art & literary works that deal with gender.
April Hughes
Associate Professor, Chinese Buddhism, Boston University
Specializations:
Chinese Buddhism
Course idea:
Women rulers and how they legitimate themselves in different regions and times
April D. Hughes received her Ph.D. in Religion from Princeton University in 2014. She completed M.A. degrees in East Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research situates medieval Chinese religion within broader cultural and social contexts. She is especially interested in medieval Chinese Buddhist manuscripts and mural paintings discovered at Dunhuang (northwest China). Her current book project is entitled “Personifying the Buddha: Politics, Gender, and Religion in Medieval China.” Over and against the assumption that political authority was argued chiefly in Confucian terms, the book investigates the different symbol systems (Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist) that emperors employed to validate their reigns. Specifically, the book highlights the centrality of Buddhism to Chinese notions of kingship, since both emperors and rebels sometimes solidified claims to the imperial throne by declaring themselves Buddhas incarnate, descended to earth in order to rule and revive Buddhist Teachings.
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Sari Edelstein
Associate Professor, English, University Massachusetts Boston
Specializations:
Nineteenth-century American literature
Age studies
Women writers
Print culture studies
Course idea:
Aging and/or girlhood from an intersectional and interdisciplinary perspective
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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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Linda Blum
Professor of Sociology, Northeastern University
Specializations:
Contemporary gender relations in US
Work, family, and intersectionality
Disability, gender, medicine, and the body
Course idea:
Teaching Feminist Inquiry. Would be interested in a gender and disability course.
Linda Blum is a qualitative, ethnographic sociologist who studies persistence, change, and contradictions in contemporary gender relations. Her interests include: Gender, Medicine, and the Body; Work, Family, and Intersections of Gender, Race, and Class Inequality; Sociological Theory; Qualitative and Ethnographic Methods; Feminist Theory and Methods. She began her sociological career researching and writing on women’s grassroots movements for comparable pay, but has since developed another focus on ideologies of motherhood in the United States, how we judge fit and unfit, respectable and disreputable, and measure mothers against each other in ways that reinforce class and race inequality. She is the author of Between Feminism and Labor: The Significance of the Comparable Worth Movement (1991, University of California Press); At the Breast: Ideologies of Breastfeeding and Motherhood in the Contemporary United States (1999, Beacon); and Raising Generation Rx: Mothering Kids with Invisible Disabilities in an Age of Inequality (2015, NYU Press).
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Ann Withorn
Professor, Social Policy Emeritus
Professor Emeritus
Specializations:
Social policy
Poverty
Women and welfare
Course idea:
“Women/Welfare and the social state: Examining histories of intersections, conflicts and social meanings”
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Alisa Bokulich
Professor, Philosophy of Science, Boston University
Specializations:
Philosophy of Science
Science, Technology & Values
Course idea:
Gender, Race, and Science
Alisa Bokulich received her Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame’s Program in History and Philosophy of Science. She is the director of the Center for Philosophy & History of Science at BU (since 2010), where she also organizes the Boston Colloquium for Philosophy of Science.
Professor Bokulich is also an Associate Member of Harvard University’s History of Science Department. She has been the recipient of several grants from the National Science Foundation. She is currently working on a book on philosophical issues in the Earth Sciences.
Professor Bokulich’s teaching at Boston University includes courses in the philosophy of science; philosophy of physics; gender, race and science; and science, technology, and values.
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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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Branden Fitelson
Research Scientist, Division of Adolescent/Young Adult Medicine, Boston Children’s Hospital and Instructor, Department of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School
Specializations:
Logic
Epistemology
Cognitive science
Course idea:
None specified
Before teaching at Northeastern, Branden held teaching positions at Rutgers, UC-Berkeley, San José State, and Stanford and visiting positions at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy at LMU-Munich (MCMP @ LMU) and the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation at the University of Amsterdam (ILLC @ UvA). Branden got his MA and PhD in philosophy from UW-Madison. Before entering philosophy, Branden studied math and physics at Wisconsin, and he worked as a research scientist at Argonne National Laboratory and a NASA contractor.
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Sabra Katz-Wise
Research Scientist, Division of Adolescent/Young Adult Medicine, Boston Children’s Hospital and Instructor, Department of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School
sabra.katz-wise@childrens.harvard.edu
Specializations:
LGBTQ health inequities
Sexual orientation and gender identity development and fluidity
Psychosocial functioning of families with transgender and/or nonbinary youth
Course idea:
None specified
Dr. Sabra L. Katz-Wise, PhD (she/her) is an Associate Professor in Adolescent/Young Adult Medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital, in Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, and in Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. She is also Adjunct Faculty at The Fenway Institute. She is Director of the Harvard SOGIE (Sexual Orientation Gender Identity and Expression) Health Equity Research Collaborative, and she is a Senior Faculty Advisor for the Boston Children’s Office of Health Equity and Inclusion. Dr. Katz-Wise’s research uses community-engaged mixed methods to investigate sexual orientation and gender identity development and fluidity, health inequities related to sexual orientation and gender identity in adolescents and young adults, and psychosocial functioning in families with transgender and nonbinary youth. Her work has been funded by several grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Boston Children’s Aerosmith Endowment Fund and is widely published in peer-reviewed journals. In addition to research, Dr. Katz-Wise is involved with advocacy efforts to improve the workplace climate, patient care, and learning environment for LGBTQ+ individuals, including her role on the Queer Leadership Council for the Boston Children’s Rainbow Alliance and member of the Boston Children’s Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Council.
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Shameka Powell
Assistant Professor of Education, Tufts University
Shameka.Powell@tufts.edu
Specializations:
Sociology of education
Race theory
Educational Equity
Social Context of Schooling
Course idea:
None specified
Shameka N. Powell is an Associate Professor of Educational Studies and affiliated with the Master of Arts in Teaching program in the Department of Education. Dr. Powell's research focuses on equality of educational opportunity and the intersections of race, class, gender in school spaces. Specifically, they interrogate how institutional agents create, exacerbate, and alleviate stratification patterns within schools. Additionally, Dr. Powell examines critical literacy approaches teachers and students employ within classrooms. They situate their research within Critical Race Theory and Queer of Color Theories.
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Carney Maley
Lecturer of Women's and Gender Studies, UMass Boston
Specializations:
Women in U.S. social movements
Women in 20th century literature
Gender and popular culture
Course idea:
None specified
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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.
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Libby Adler
Professor of Law, Northeastern University
Specializations:
Constitutional and family law
Administrative law
Gender, Sexuality and gender identity, and sexuality
Course idea:
None specified
Professor Adler holds a joint appointment with the School of Law and the College of Social Sciences and Humanities. She teaches Constitutional Law, Sexuality, Gender and the Law, Family Law and Administrative Law. Professor Adler has written extensively on sexuality, gender, family and children, including foster care, and draws heavily from queer and critical theory. Her book, Gay Priori: A Queer Critical Legal Studies Approach to Law Reform, was published in April 2018 by Duke University Press. She is also a co-editor of the casebook Mary Joe Frug’s Women and the Law (4th ed.), and has written about contemporary legal issues arising out of Nazism.
Professor Adler has served as a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, where she taught Women and the Law, and at the University of Frankfurt, where she taught a course on contemporary legal fallout from the Nazi labor program. She received the Northeastern University Excellence in Teaching Award in 2007-2008.
Prior to joining the permanent faculty, Professor Adler served Northeastern as a visiting professor in 1999-2000 and as a part-time lecturer in 1998-1999, while also a visiting researcher and graduate fellow at Harvard Law School. In the 1990s, she practiced as a policy attorney for the Massachusetts child support enforcement agency, drafting legislation and regulations.
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Brittany Charlton
Instructor, Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital
bcharlton@mail.harvard.edu
Specializations:
- Epidemiology
- LGBTQ health
Course idea:
None specified
Dr. Brittany Charlton is an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School, Boston Children’s Hospital, and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health's Department of Epidemiology. She is also an Associate Epidemiologist in the Channing Division of Network Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital and a Lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Dr. Charlton's epidemiologic research primarily focuses on reproductive health. One area of her work examines the development and prevention of sexual orientation-related disparities with a focus on reproductive health topics such as HPV/cervical cancer, teen pregnancy, and family planning. A second area of her research investigates the health effects of using contraceptives. Previously, Dr. Charlton worked on Capitol Hill as well as for non-profit organizations including NARAL and the Center for Reproductive Rights. She completed a year of national service in AmeriCorps, during which she was based at New York’s LGBT Callen-Lorde Community Health Center. Dr. Charlton trained as a predoctoral fellow at Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s Ob/Gyn Epidemiology Center and was a Visiting Scientist at the Statens Serum Institut in Copenhagen, Denmark. She completed the Postdoctoral Fellowship in Sexual Orientation and Health Disparities Research at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Charlton holds a BA from The New School as well as an MSc and ScD from the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
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Sally Haslanger
Professor of Philosophy, MIT
shaslang@mit.edu
Specializations:
- Race
- Gender
- Epistemology
- Social ontology
Course idea:
None specified
Sally Haslanger is a professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. She has published on topics in metaphysics, epistemology and feminist theory, with a recent emphasis on accounts of the social construction of race and gender. In metaphysics, her work has focused on theories of substance, especially on the problem of persistence through change and on Aristotle's view that substances are composites of matter and form. Her work in feminist theory takes up issues in feminist epistemology and metaphysics, with a special interest in the distinction between natural and social kinds. She has co-edited Adoption Matters: Philosophical and Feminist Essays (Cornell University Press, 2005) with Charlotte Witt, Theorizing Feminisms (Oxford University Press, 2005) with Elizabeth Hackett, and Persistence (MIT Press, 2006) with Roxanne Marie Kurtz. She regularly teaches courses cross-listed with Women's Studies. Before coming to MIT, she taught at the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and the University of California-Irvine.
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Kathrin Zippel
Associate Professor of Sociology, Northeastern University
Specializations:
Gender
Work and Organizations
Gender Equity Politics
Science
Course idea:
None specified
Kathrin Zippel has published on gender politics in the workplace, public and social policy, social movements, welfare states, and globalization in the United States and Europe. Her book, The Politics of Sexual Harassment in the United States, the European Union and Germany, (Cambridge University Press) won several awards.
Her current research explores gender and global transformations of science and education. In her book, Women in Global Science: Advancing Careers Through International Collaboration (Stanford University Press), she argues that global science is the new frontier for women, providing both opportunities and challenges as gender shapes the dynamics and practices of international research. She directs a NSF- funded interdisciplinary network analysis to study the diffusion of ideas on gender equity interventions among U.S. Universities.
Zippel is a co-chair of the Social Exclusion and Inclusion Seminar at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies Harvard University and was a residential fellow at the Women and Public Policy Program at the Harvard Kennedy School. She served as co-PI of Northeastern’s National Science Foundation ADVANCE Institutional Transformation grant. She held a Humboldt Research fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne and the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich; was a guest at Radboud University, Nijmegen, the WZB Social Science Research Center in Berlin, and the European University Institute in Florence. Zippel received a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and was a post-doc at the European Union Center of New York at Columbia University.
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Chris Bobel
Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies, UMass Boston
Specializations:
Embodiment
Feminist activism
Social movements
Health
Critical development studies
Course idea:
None specified
Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston where she teaches courses on Gender & the Body, Feminist Theory, Feminist Research Methods, Women in US Social Movements and Feminist Activism. Chris is interested, most broadly, in the social construction of embodiment, and the diverse efforts of actors to effect social change especially around issues that are stigmatized and otherwise marginalized and how feminist thinking becomes feminist doing at the most intimate and immediate levels. In short, she finds the body-- a site where social norms, cultural anxieties and political agendas come to life-- an endlessly fascinating subject of inquiry.
Chris is the author, most recently, of The Managed Body: Developing Girls and Menstrual Health in the Global South just released this month. Her other books include The Paradox of Natural Mothering, New Blood: Third Wave Feminism and the Politics of Menstruation and Embodied Resistance: Breaking the Rules, Challenging the Norms (co-edited with Samantha Kwan). Her current major projects in progress include a 2nd co-edited collection titled Body Battlegrounds: Transgressions, Tensions and Transformations (forthcoming with Vanderbilt University Press in Winter 2019), and serving as lead editor of The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies [due out in 2020] and a new ethnographic project exploring contemporary activism inspired by grief and trauma.
Chris is past president of the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research and often quoted in the mainstream media about the rapidly growing menstrual activist movement including The New York Times, The Huffington Post, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Time, NPR, USA Today, The Atlantic, El Mundo,Agence France-Presse, and the Associated Press.
For a complete list of her publications and public intellectual engagements, see https://works.bepress.com/chris_bobel/