Posts in Board of Representatives
Kristin M. Peterson

Boston College

Kristin M. Peterson is an Assistant 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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Yuri doolan

Brandeis University

Yuri Doolan is Assistant Professor of History and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the inaugural chair of Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies at Brandeis University. He is an award-winning historian whose work explores the anti-Asian racism and gendered and sexualized violence of US militarism and empire. His book titled, The First Amerasians: Mixed Race Koreans from Camptowns to America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024) tells the powerful, oftentimes heartbreaking, story of how Americans created and used the concept of the "Amerasian" to remove thousands of mixed race children from their Korean mothers in US-occupied South Korea to adoptive American homes during the 1950s and 1960s. The First Amerasians explores the Cold War ideologies undergirding this so-called rescue and shows how this process of child removal and placement via US refugee and adoption laws profoundly shaped the lives of mixed race Koreans and their mothers. Yuri is also the author of a number of peer-reviewed essays and public facing works exploring the lasting legacies and human consequences of the Korean War. His works on military brides, transnational and transracial adoption, mixed race Koreans, the US camptown military sex industry, and “comfort women” appear or are forthcoming in Critical Ethnic StudiesThe Journal of Asian American StudiesDiplomatic HistoryTogether at Last: Stories of Adoption and Reunion in the Age of DNA, Mixed Korean: Our Stories (인종주의의덫을 넘어서: 혼혈 한국인, 혼혈 입양인 이야), The Journal of American Ethnic HistoryKoreatowns: Exploring the Economics, Politics, and Identities of Korean Spatial Formation경계를 넘는 한인들: 이주, 젠더, 세대와 귀속의 정치, and a permanent installation in Berlin called Die „Trostfrauen“ und der gemeinsame Kampf gegen sexualisierte Gewalt.

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Linda Schlossberg

Harvard University

Linda Schlossberg received her PhD in English and American Literature from Harvard, where she now serves as Associate Director of Studies for the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program and teaches courses in literature and writing. She was honored to receive 2022 and 2019 Somerville Arts Council/Mass Cultural Council Grants, an Emerging Writer Fellowship from the Writer's Center, and grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Schlossberg is the author of the novel Life In Miniature and the editor of Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion (NYU Press), and she is currently at work on a memoir.  She was chosen as a Harvard Derek Bok Center Faculty Fellow and was twice selected by Harvard’s graduating classes as one of their “Favorite Professors.” Her work has appeared in a variety of publications and she is the Book Review Editor for Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.

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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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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 Literature and Writing at Simmons University, Director of the Master's program in Gender and Cultural Studies, and co-coordinator of the interdisciplinary minor in Cinema and Media Studies. She is also the Chair of the board of Console-ing Passions, an organization devoted to the study of Television, Video, Audio, New Media, and Feminism.

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. She is co-editor of the recently published anthology Imagining We in the Age of I: Romance and Social Bonding in Contemporary Culture​ (Routledge, 2021)​​​. She is also the author of Wife, Inc.: The Business of Marriage in the Twenty-First Century (NYU, 2018); Fatal Attraction (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009); and the co-editor of Fifty Hollywood Directors (Routledge, 2015).

Leonard has been featured in The Boston Globe, The Guardian, USA Today, and a variety of media outlets, including The Los Angeles Review of Books, NPR and the podcast Public Intellectual with Jessa Crispin.

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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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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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