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.

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.

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 Studies, The Journal of Asian American Studies, Diplomatic History, Together 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 History, Koreatowns: Exploring the Economics, Politics, and Identities of Korean Spatial Formation, 경계를 넘는 한인들: 이주, 젠더, 세대와 귀속의 정치, and a permanent installation in Berlin called Die „Trostfrauen“ und der gemeinsame Kampf gegen sexualisierte Gewalt.

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.

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.

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. 

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.