Kristin M. Peterson
Boston College
Kristin M. Peterson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Boston College, teaching courses related to the intersections of media and religion. She earned her Ph.D. in Media Studies from the University of Colorado Boulder, where she was also a research fellow for the Center for Media, Religion and Culture. Her research focuses on religious expression in digital media, specifically examining how young people engage with online media sites, images, videos and creative projects as spaces to develop meaning and for feminist activism. She is the author of Unruly Souls: The Digital Activism of Muslim and Christian Feminists(Rutgers University Press, 2022), as well as articles and book chapters on Muslim Instagram influencers, the #ChurchToo and #MosqueMeToo movements, the digital mourning after the murder of three Muslim college students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, ḥijab tutorial videos on YouTube, the Ms. Marvel comic series, and the Mipsterz fashion video.
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Sandra McEvoy
Boston University
Sandra McEvoy is a Clinical Associate Professor of Political Science and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Boston University. McEvoy’s primary research interests include the dynamics of political change including women’s participation in political violence; and gender-focused strategies that incorporate perpetrators of political violence into long-term conflict resolution strategies. She has written extensively on the Northern Irish conflict including, the gendered motivations for women's participation in political violence and the impact that such participation has on notions of men and masculinity. McEvoy’s secondary area of interest explores the vulnerabilities of LGBT+ populations during conflict and natural disasters. Her current project is as coeditor of The Oxford Handbook on Global LGBT Politics (expected fall 2019). The Handbook is one of the earliest collections that uses sexuality as a critical lens through which to understand global politics.
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V Varun Chaudhry
Brandeis University
V Varun Chaudhry (they/he) is a cultural anthropologist whose work focuses on gender, race, sexuality, and class in the United States. His research and teaching focuses on the institutionalization of racialized and gendered categories and logics in US-based nonprofit and funding organizations, as well as the US academy. V's writing spans academic scholarship, organizational training materials, and public scholarship. Their writing appears in GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies; Signs: journal of women and culture in society; Transgender Studies Quarterly (TSQ); Feminist Theory; Feminist Anthropology; differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies; American Anthropologist; Critical Inquiry; and The Foundation Review. V is the primary author of Transforming Inclusion: An Organizational Guide, published by the Leeway Foundation in 2018 as a resource for cultural organizations, foundations, and feminist and LGBTQ advocacy organizations to better affirm transgender and gender nonconforming people; Out in Research: A Guide to LGBTQ Market Research, published by Suzy, Incorporated in 2021; and Funding Trans Resilience, based on ethnographic work with the Trans Resilience Fund (a project of the Gender Justice Fund in Philly), in 2022; and a forthcoming 10-year retrospective for the Trans Justice Funding Project. V has also conducted community-based research and consulted with Bread and Roses Community Fund in Philadelphia.
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Rachel Molko
MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
Rachel E. Molko is a lecturer in MIT's Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication program. She earned her Ph.D. in English in 2023 from Northeastern University, specializing in writing and rhetoric. Her research centers feminist rhetorics in popular culture with a focus on rhetorics of femininity. Since 2016, she has held teaching and administrative positions in writing programs at MIT, Northeastern University, and University of Central Florida. Leading up to her Ph.D., she earned a Bachelor’s in Editing, Writing, and Media and a Master’s in Rhetoric and Composition. Outside of work, she enjoys watching Jeopardy! with her husband, practicing hot vinyasa, and spending time with her cats. Her work is featured in Peitho: Journal of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric & Composition.
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Nicole Aljoe
Northeastern University
Nicole N. Aljoe is Professor of English and Africana Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. She is co-Director of The Early Caribbean Digital Archive and Mapping Black London, and Director of the Early Black Boston Digital Almanac. Her research and teaching focuses on 18th and early 19th Century Black Atlantic and Caribbean literatures with specializations in slave narrative, early novels about race, and digital humanities. The author of Creole Testimonies: Slave Narratives from the British West Indies, 1709-1836 (Palgrave 2012) and co-editor of Journeys of the Slave Narrative in the Early Americas (UVA Press 2014) as well as A Literary History of the Early Anglophone Caribbean: Islands in the Stream (Palgrave/Springer 2018), her essays have appeared in African American Review, American Literary History, Anthurium, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, The Journal of Early American Literature, and Women’s Studies.
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Suzanne Leonard
SIMMONS UNIVERSITY
Suzanne Leonard is Professor of Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Simmons University, and co-coordinator of the interdisciplinary minor in Cinema and Media Studies.
Leonard is most interested in the intersections between feminism and popular culture, and her recently published work has examined topics including: public feminisms, chic noir, white feminism, wedding comedies, and The Real Housewives franchise.
Leonard is the author of Wife, Inc.: The Business of Marriage in the Twenty-First Century (2018) and Fatal Attraction (2009). She is also co-editor of Fifty Hollywood Directors (2014) and Imagining We in the Age of I: Romance and Social Bonding in Contemporary Culture (2021), which won MeCCSA’s (Media, Communication, and Cultural Studies Association) Outstanding Achievement Award for Edited Collection of the Year. She is currently working on a book entitled A Feminist Guide to Marriage, which will be published by Goldsmiths Press in the fall of 2026.
Leonard has been featured in The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Fortune, USA Today and a variety of media outlets, including The Los Angeles Review of Books and NPR.
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Sonal Sharma
Tufts University
Sonal Sharma is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Tufts University. He holds a PhD in sociology from Johns Hopkins University. His research interests include capitalism, labor informality, and social reproduction with a focus on how class, caste, race, and gender shape labor politics.
Currently, he is working on his book that critically examines domestic workers’ movement in India and South Africa. Through a comparative lens, he explores how domestic workers mobilize for labor rights, the role of the state in shaping their working conditions, and the influence of trade unions and NGOs on their struggles. His writings have been published in Critical Sociology, Sociology of Development, South Asian History and Culture, and Economic and Political Weekly, among others.
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Andrés Fabián Henao Castro
UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS BOSTON
Andrés Fabián Henao Castro is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Before joining UMB, he held a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Academy of Global Humanities and Critical Theory at the University of Bologna/Duke University and was the Karl Lowenstein Fellow at Amherst College. His research deals with the relationship between ancient and contemporary political theory, via the prisms of decolonial theory, psychoanalysis, critical theory, settler colonial critique, and poststructuralism. He is the author of The Militant Intellect: Critical Theory’s Conceptual Personae (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022) and Antigone in the Americas: Democracy, Sexuality and Death In the Settler Colonial Present (SUNY Press, 2021). His research has also been published in Critical Philosophy of Race,Settler Colonial Studies, Theoria, Theory & Event, Representation, La Deleuziana, Theatre Survey, Contemporary Political Theory, and Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, among others.
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Melanie Robinson
Program Manager
Melanie Robinson is the Program Manager for the Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality. She manages the day to day operations of GCWS in collaboration with the Board of Directors. She oversees course development, the course logistics during each academic year, the creation and implementation of faculty and student events, social media and communications, and coordinates with the nine member institutions of GCWS.
Prior to joining the Consortium, Melanie worked with the MIT Internet Policy Research Initiative overseeing their administrative and operational affairs as well as events. Her career is rooted in student support and project management. Most notably, she was one of the early project managers and lead advisers for the PACE Program at UT Austin. Melanie is the treasurer and entertainment committee chair for Boston Pride for the People, and served as the entertainment co-chair for Boston Pop-Up Pride. She is also a founding member of New England Black Circus, training and performing in trapeze (static and dance) and aerial hoop. Melanie holds a BA in Women’s and Gender Studies from Simmons University.
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Gowri Vijayakumar
Brandeis University
Gowri Vijayakumar is an Assistant Professor of Sociology, Core Faculty in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Affiliated Faculty in South Asian Studies at Brandeis University. Her research and teaching use feminist, queer, and transnational lenses to illuminate the trajectories of social movements, the everyday life of the state, and the political economy of globalization. She is the author of At Risk: Indian Sexual Politics and the Global AIDS Crisis (Stanford University Press, 2021) and co-editor of Sociology of South Asia: Postcolonial Legacies, Global Imaginaries (Palgrave-MacMillan, forthcoming). She also worked with Akkai Padmashali to write her autobiography, A Small Step in a Long Journey (Zubaan, 2022). Her articles on the politics of pandemics, sex work, and gendered labor have appeared or are forthcoming in Social Problems, Gender & Society, Qualitative Sociology, World Development, Signs, and Contemporary South Asia.
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Caley Horan
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Caley Horan is an associate professor of history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research and teaching interests include the history of risk and uncertainty, business and capitalism, gender, sexuality, and feminist activism in the modern United States. She is the author of Insurance Era: Risk, Governance, and the Privatization of Security in Postwar America (Chicago, 2021), and is currently at work on a book project that traces the history of astrological practice and consumption in the US from the turn of the twentieth century to the present.
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Lily Mengesha
Tufts University
Lily Mengesha is the Fletcher Foundation Assistant Professor of Dramatic Literature in the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies at Tufts University. Her research and teaching live at the intersection of critical Indigenous studies, gender and sexuality studies and performance theory. Her current book project, Critical Dreaming: Performance and Decoloniality in the Americas, argues for dreaming as a central tool for perceptual transformation within a decolonial project, particularly in the works of Indigenous-centered and feminist artists throughout North and Central America. Her research seeks to illuminate how artists use their bodies as active agents for documenting legacies of dispossession as well as blueprints for healing and transformation. Her writing on this topic can be found in The Drama Review, Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Journal, and Canadian Theatre Review.
Dr. Mengesha's research has been supported by various awards, grants and fellowships including the New England Humanities Consortium, the Center for Humanities at Tufts, MIT School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, the American Society for Theatre Research, the Joukowsky Family Foundation, the Cogut Center for the Humanities, the Pembroke Center for the Research and Teaching of Women, the Social Science Research Council and Mellon Mays Foundation. She currently serves on the advisory board of Tufts’ Women Gender and Sexuality Studies program, as well as a member of the Executive Committee for the American Society of Theatre Research.
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Carol Hurd Green
Carol Hurd Green is an Associate Professor of English at Boston College. Formerly an Associate Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences, she continues to have responsibility for the Arts and Sciences interdisciplinary programs while directing the Donovan Urban Teaching Scholars in the Lynch School of Education. She currently teaches in the Boston College Capstone program.
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Joyce Antler
Joyce Antler is the Samuel Lane Professor of American Jewish History and Culture at Brandeis University, where she teaches in the American Studies Department and Women's and Gender Studies Program. Her major fields of interest include women's history, American Jewish history and culture, the history of education, and history as theater.
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Alice Jardine
Alice Jardine is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. Her research interests include 20th and 21st century French and Francophone literature, feminist theory, Women, Gender and Sexuality studies, postmodern and transmodern theories of culture and society, and the American 1950s.
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Ruth Perry
Ruth Perry, Ruth Perry, is the Ann Fetter Friedlaender Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the founding director of MIT's Women's Studies Program. The author of numerous books and articles, she has written on such canonical figures as Pope, Sterne, Richardson, and Austen as well as on contemporary women writers such as Grace Paley and Mary Gordon.
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Laura Frader
Laura Frader is Professor of History and the Chair of the History Department at Northeastern. She specializes in French social and labor history and European women's and gender history. and has written extensively on these topics. Her publications include Gender and Class in Modern Europe (co-edited with Sonya O. Rose, 1996), and Peasants and Protest: Agricultural Workers, Politics and Unions in the Aude, 1850-1914 (1991),Race in France: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Politics of Difference (with Herrick Chapman) and Breadwinners and Citizens: Gender in the Making of the French Social Model (forthcoming).
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Christiane Zehl Romero
Christiane Zehl Romero is Professor of German and Rhetoric and director of the German Program at Tufts University. Her research interests include the twentieth century, women writers, film, and advanced language. She is the author of four books and has worked and published extensively on the German writer Anna Seghers.
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Barbara Haber
Barbara Haber served as Curator of Books at the Radcliffe Institute's Schlesinger Library at Harvard University. She developed a major collection of over 16,000 volumes on cooking and food. She established the Radcliffe Culinary Friends and sponsored lectures and panel discussions by food-world notables.
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