Posts tagged Current
Kristin M. Peterson
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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Board of RepresentativesChristian MatyiCurrent, Boston College
Sandra McEvoy
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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Board of RepresentativesGuest UserCurrent, Boston University
V Varun Chaudhry
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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Board of RepresentativesMel RobCurrent, Tufts
Rachel Molko
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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Board of RepresentativesMel RobCurrent, MIT
Nicole Aljoe
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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Board of RepresentativesMel RobCurrent, Northeastern
Suzanne Leonard
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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Board of RepresentativesChristian MatyiSimmons, Current
Sonal Sharma
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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Board of RepresentativesMel RobCurrent, Tufts
Andrés Fabián Henao Castro
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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Board of RepresentativesChristian MatyiCurrent, UMass Boston
Melanie Robinson
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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StaffMel RobCurrent