Jocelyn Viterna
Professor, Sociology, Harvard University
Specializations:
Sociology, Reproductive Justice
Reproductive Health
Gender and Politics
Criminalization of Sexuality and Reproduction
Implicit/Explicit Gender Bias in the Judicial System
Gender-based Violence
Gender and War
Latin America
Course idea:
None specified
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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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Heidi Levitt
Professor, Psychology, UMASS Boston
Specializations:
LGBTQ+ gender and LGBTQ+ gender communities (e.g., trans, butch, femme, bear, leather, drag, families/houses)
Qualitative and mixed methods research
Feminist, critical, and constructivist epistemological perspectives to inquiry
Psychotherapeutic change and healing from stigma-related experiences
Course idea:
I would be interested in co-developing a course focused on LGBTQ+ gender identities and/or LGBTQ+ gender communities. The course could examine the practices and functions of genders using intersectional and social justice lenses, and engage multidisciplinary themes related to culture, sexuality, activism, physical aesthetics, gender theory, and identity.
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Chris A Barcelos
Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, UMass Boston
Associate Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Specializations:
Critical public health
Sexualities studies
Queer of color critique
Transgender studies
Youth
Course idea:
none specified
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David Sherman
Associate Professor, English, Brandeis University
Specializations:
Global modernism
Elegy and the politics of commemoration
Public sphere theory
Comedy
Literature in the criminal justice system
Literature and philosophy
Course idea:
Death and Feminism. A course on feminist and queer mortuary politics, including attention to literature, visual art, performance, and other expressive practices as sites of cultural intervention in the lives of the dead.
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Sylvia Sellers-Garcia
Associate Professor, History, Boston College
Specializations:
Colonial Latin America
Early modern Spain
Colonial Central America
History of empire
Narrative and literature
Course idea:
Comparative Colonialism Criminality, Violence, Gender, and Legal Structures
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Marilynn Johnson
Professor, History, Boston College
Specializations:
Modern U.S. urban, immigration, and social history
The American West
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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Christa Kelleher
Director of Policy and Research, Lecturer, UMass Boston
Specializations:
Identifying, analyzing, and promoting public policies that improve the conditions of women’s lives
Advancing women’s public leadership
State and local policy development
Course idea:
Non specified
Kelleher oversees research on women’s public leadership and a range of public policy issues that affect women, with a particular focus on women’s reproductive and maternal health.
Christa Kelleher has been teaching in the Center’s Graduate Certificate Program for Gender, Leadership, and Public Policy (previously Program for Women in Politics and Public Policy) since 2002 and currently teaches the Internship course with colleague Elena Stone. She has previously taught courses in sociology, community health, public affairs, and public policy at Greater Boston area institutions including Pine Manor College, Brandeis University, and Tufts University.
Kelleher’s federally funded doctoral study examined the complex issues facing Boston and Toronto-based mothers during the early postpartum period to inform public policies related to this important women’s health issue.
Her background includes work on political campaigns, in the Massachusetts Legislature, and in not-for-profit advocacy organizations.
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Edmund Bertschinger
Professor, Physics, MIT
Professor, Physics
Specializations:
Astrophysics
Classical and quantum mechanics
Social justice practice
Course idea:
None specified
Find more information about Edmund Bertschinger’s work on his personal website.
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Alecia McGregor
Assistant Professor, Community Health, Tufts University
Specializations:
Health inequities
Health care outcomes
Maternal health
Urban health policies
Course idea:
Non specified
Alecia McGregor earned her Ph.D. in Health Policy from Harvard University in 2014, where she received a certificate in Latin American Studies and was a National Institute of Mental Health trainee. From 2014 to 2016 she was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Center for Health and Wellbeing at Princeton University. At Princeton, she helped launch an initiative on Race, Inequality and Health Policy in the United States.
Dr. McGregor's research focuses on health inequalities and the political determinants of health. She has done work on HIV/AIDS disparities, religion and public opinion, mental health and substance abuse policy, and urban health policies; and her research draws on multiple approaches including quantitative, qualitative, comparative, and survey analyses. Her doctoral dissertation analyzed the politics of health care provision in both the United States and Brazil. Currently, she is researching the drivers and consequences of hospital closures in the U.S., and the politics of drug treatment policy in the U.S. and Brazil. Outside of work, she enjoys bicycling, tennis, and anything outdoors.
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Christopher Schmitt
Assistant Professor, Anthropology, Boston University
Specializations:
Mechanistic and adaptive aspects of developmental variation in primates
Genetics and genomics
Behavioral ecology
Physiology
Morphometrics
Course idea:
Non specified
Dr. Christopher Schmitt is a biological anthropologist whose research explores mechanistic and adaptive aspects of developmental variation using techniques from behavioral ecology, physiology, morphometrics, and genomics.
Through intensive fieldwork across Africa and the Caribbean with the International Vervet Research Consortium, Dr. Schmitt has collected biological samples from over two thousand wild vervet monkeys. Current projects in his lab using this dataset include characterizing evolutionary patterns in the developmental morphometrics and physiology of various vervet populations, including the use of population and comparative genomic techniques. Dr. Schmitt also investigates the genomics of metabolic function and disorders during development in over 700 fully sequenced and pedigreed captive vervets at Wake Forest University. Work in his lab is ongoing to assess the phenotypic impact captive-identified obesity-related genes in his extensive wild sample, assessing variability in phenotype expression and population-specific selection based on local ecology and anthropogenic impacts. Field work for these projects is ongoing (UROP students are welcome to apply), and can be followed on social media at #BUvervets.
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Kareem Khubchandani
Mellon Bridge Assistant Professor, Drama & Dance, Tufts University
Specializations:
Performance studies
Queer studies
South Asian studies
Course idea:
Non specified
Kareem Khubchandani (any pronouns) is Associate Professor of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies at Tufts University. He is the author of Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife (University of Michigan Press, 2020), which received the 2019 CLAGS: Center for LGBTQ Studies Fellowship award, the 2021 Dance Studies Association de la Torre Bueno best book award, and the 2021 ATHE Outstanding Book Award. Kareem is co-editor of Queer Nightlife (University of Michigan Press) and curator of www.criticalauntystudies.com. He holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from Northwestern University, and previously served as Embrey Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
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Jill Weinberg
Assistant Professor, Sociology, Tufts University
Specializations:
Crime, Law, Deviance
Sports
The body
Research Methods
Course idea:
Non specified
Jill D. Weinberg is an Associate Professor of Sociology and an affiliated scholar at the American Bar Foundation in Chicago, IL. She joined Tufts University after serving as a Visiting Assistant Professor at DePaul University.
She is a scholar who examines the decriminalization through social process, focusing on the ways groups use rules, norms, and the language of consent and choice. Her first book, Consensual Violence: Sex, Sports, and the Politics of Injury(University of California Press 2016), examines how two groups that willingly engage in seemingly violent activities — mixed-martial arts and sexual sadomasochism -- enact elaborate law-like rules to organize themselves and to demonstrate their legitimacy to a broader public. Her second book project is a cross-country comparison of assisted death and the ways terminally ill people, their loved ones, and medical professionals navigate laws that proscribe or permit aid-in-dying.
Her second research stream emerges from the "Contested Constructions of Discrimination Project" funded by the American Bar Foundation. This project uses experimental research design and semi-structured interviews to compare how ordinary people and trial judges define employment discrimination.
She is widely published in peer-review journals such as Sociological Science, Sociological Methods & Research, and Law & Social Inquiry. Popular accounts of her work have appeared in the Advocate, the Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo, Truthout, and the Society Pages.
In her free time, she is an avid runner and enjoys hanging out with her pugs.
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Lerna Ekmekçioglu
Associate Professor, History, MIT
Specializations:
History of feminism
War
Women and Gender
Turkey, Armenia, and the Ottoman Empire
Minority-majority relations
Course idea:
Non specified
Lerna Ekmekcioglu is a historian of the modern Middle East and the Director of the Women and Gender Studies Program. She specializes in Turkish and Armenian lands in the 19th and 20th centuries. Her work focuses on minority-majority relations and the ways in which gendered analytical lenses help us better understand coexistence and conflict, including genocide and post-genocide. She is also interested in the history of non-Western feminisms, including Armenian, Turkish, Kurdish, Jewish, and Greek women’s movements. She teaches courses on cultural pluralism, women and war, global revolutions, and women and gender in the Middle East and North Africa. Prof. Ekmekcioglu is the winner of the 2016 Levitan Teaching Award in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS), which recognizes SHASS teachers “who make a profound difference in the educational experience of MIT undergraduate and graduate students.” Prof. Ekmekcioglu organizes the Bi-annual McMillan-Stewart Lecture Series on women in the developing world.
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Christina Michaud
Senior Lecturer, Writing Program, Boston University
Master Lecturer, Writing
Specializations:
Literary analysis
Discourse analysis
Feminist intersectional parenting theory
Motherhood and breastfeeding
Sociolinguistics
Intersectionality and international students
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)
Christina Michaud has been a full-time instructor in the Writing Program since 2003. She teaches WR 097 and WR 098, the ESL writing classes mainly for first-year international students, as well as WR 100 and WR 150 sections on women’s studies. She has co-authored an ESL pronunciation textbook, a TESOL teacher-training book on goal-driven lesson planning, and numerous articles and presentations in the areas of TESOL, applied linguistics, and teacher training. Broadly, her research interests span composition and rhetoric, language and literacy, feminist literature, and gender studies.
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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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Sarah Sobieraj
Associate Professor, Sociology, Tufts
Specializations:
Digital abuse and harassment
Media, politics, and culture in the U.S.
Social movements
Course idea:
Non specified
Sarah Sobieraj is an award-winning teacher and researcher with expertise in media, politics, and culture. She is the author of The Outrage Industry: Political Opinion Media and the New Incivility (Oxford University Press 2014) with Jeff Berry, and Soundbitten: The Perils of Media-Centered Political Activism (NYU 2011). Her most recent journal articles can be found in PS: Political Science & Politics, Poetics, Political Communication, Social Problems, Sociological Theory, Sociological Inquiry, and The Sociological Quarterly. Her work has also been featured in venues such as The New York Times, Politico, CNN, PBS, The American Prospect, National Review, Pacific Standard, and Salon. Professor Sobieraj directs the Digital Sexism Project, investigating the impact of gender-based attacks against women online on political discourse. In her free time she enjoys reading, listening to storytelling podcasts, and talking politics.