Postdocs

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• Presidential Postdoctoral Associate
• Department: Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
• Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
• Research Interests: History of Science and Medicine; Social and Cultural History of U.S. Medicine; Critical Studies of Race and Gender; Reproductive Justice; Medical Humanities

BIO

Dr. Udodiri R. Okwandu (she/her) is a Presidential Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. As a Presidential Scholar at Harvard University, she earned her PhD and MA in the History of Science. As a historian of science and medicine, Dr. Okwandu's scholarship and teaching contextualize profound racial, gender, and class inequities within the U.S. healthcare landscape from the late nineteenth century to the present. She is particularly interested in examining the historical contexts of psychiatric and reproductive health injustices and sociocultural understandings of health and disease. 

Her first book project is entitled Madness and Motherhood in Black and White: A Racial History of Maternal Mental Illness in America. It investigates how racial science and racialized constructions of motherhood informed the evolving classification, diagnosis, and treatment of maternal mental illnesses (i.e., mental disorders associated with pregnancy, childbirth, and the postpartum period) in the United States from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. Recognizing that concepts of motherhood, insanity, and deviance are deeply embedded in larger racial discourses, her project asks how medical constructions of maternal mental illness have been both informed by and (re)produced the American sociocultural ideal of a mother who is white, middle-class, and domestic. In doing so, it illustrates how racialized diagnostic and therapeutic practices associated with maternal mental illness protected hegemonic constructions of white womanhood by reinforcing the conflation between "whiteness" and "good mothering" and "blackness" and "pathological mothering." It also illuminates how historical constructs of maternal mental illness continue to pose barriers for non-white and low-income mothers -- especially Black women -- within medical, legal, and social systems today. Dr. Okwandu will continue to explore the intersection of race, motherhood, and reproductive health in her second book project, a sociocultural, political, and racial history of American doulas that examines how they emerge as "solutions" to crises in the provision of maternal health care, from the 1970s home birth movement to the contemporary Black maternal health crisis.

Dr. Okwandu's writing has been featured in Nursing Clio and is forthcoming in Social History of Medicine, and edited volume titled A Cultural History of Pregnancy and Childbirth in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury Press), an edited volume titled The Nursing Clio Reader (Rutgers University Press, Critical Issues in Health and Medicine Series). Her work has been supported by the American Association for University Women, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, and the Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, the Commission on Women and Gender Studies, the Harvard Merit/Graduate Society, and the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History. 

Dr. Okwandu has remained invested in using her research and teaching experiences to address racial inequity in medicine and gaps in science education. From 2021-2024, Udodiri served as an Anti-Racist Science Education Research and Content Development Consultant for LabXchange, a free science education platform that serves over 10 million learners and educators worldwide. She has also worked as a Creative and Content Consultant with Ancestry -- the largest genealogy company in the world. Finally, from 2020-2021, she served as a Research Historian for the HistoryMakers, non-profit research and educational institution committed to preserving and making widely accessible the untold stories of African Americans. 

Outside of research, writing, and teaching, Dr. Okwandu enjoys community-building, exploring the aerial arts, practicing yoga, writing poetry, painting, reading fiction, and spending time outdoors. 

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• Postdoctoral Associate, Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice (ISGRJ)
• Department: Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
• Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
• Research Interests: Gender & Sexuality Studies, Performance Studies, Dance Studies, Black Studies, Discourses of HIV/AIDS, Queer Diasporas, 20th and 21st century LGBTQIA literature, Poetics, Archives, Oral History, Feminist and Queer Methods, Arts Writing, Creative Writing
• Education: Ph.D. in English, The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY), M.F.A in Creative Writing, The City College of New York, CUNY

BIO

Jaime Shearn Coan’s research attends to corporeal archives—in particular, to the circulation of embodied knowledge related to race, nation, gender, sexuality, and seropositivity. From 2020–22, Shearn Coan was the Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow at ONE Archives Foundation in Los Angeles. Shearn Coan received his PhD in English from The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). His dissertation, “Corporeal Archives of HIV/AIDS: The Performance of Relation,” was supported by a 2019–20 CUNY Dissertation Fellowship at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (NYPL). 

Shearn Coan’s writing has appeared in publications including ASAP Journal, TDR: The Drama Review, Critical Correspondence, The Brooklyn Rail, Movement Research Performance Journal, Gulf Coast, On Curating, and Women & Performance. He is the co-editor with Ishmael Houston Jones and Will Rawls, of Lost and Found: Dance, New York, HIV/AIDS, Then and Now (Danspace Project 2016) and, with Tara Aisha Willis, of Marking the Occasion (Wendy’s Subway, 2020). His poetry chapbook, Turn it Over, was published in 2015 by Argos Books. He is currently at work on a monograph on the performance works of Assotto Saint, and recently authored the introduction to Sacred Spells: Collected Works of Assotto Saint (Nightboat Books 2023). He is also co-author with Tara Aisha Willis and taisha paggett of In the Horizontal Plane: taisha paggett Performance Works, forthcoming from Soberscove Press in 2024. 

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• Mellon Postdoctoral Associate, Institute for Research on Women (IRW) Scholar, in conjunction with the Women’s and Gender Studies Department

• Maya received her Ph.D. from Columbia University's Department of Anthropology. Her dissertation, entitled "Sex, Secularism and Sectarianism: Practicing Citizenship in Contemporary Lebanon," is an ethnography of the Lebanese legal system and of the entanglements between gender, sex, and sectarianism. She is also Co-Founder/Editor of Jadaliyya Ezine and Co-Director of the documentary film About Baghdad. She works at the intersection of legal anthropology, feminism, queer theory, and theories of secularism and religion.

Maya received her Ph.D. from Columbia University's Department of Anthropology. Her dissertation, entitled "Sex, Secularism and Sectarianism: Practicing Citizenship in Contemporary Lebanon," is an ethnography of the Lebanese legal system and of the entanglements between gender, sex, and sectarianism. She is also Co-Founder/Editor of Jadaliyya Ezine and Co-Director of the documentary film About Baghdad. She works at the intersection of legal anthropology, feminism, queer theory, and theories of secularism and religion.

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• ACLS Faculty Fellow and Postdoctoral Associate

• Ikuko Asaka received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a historian of the United States with an emphasis on women, gender, and sexuality, African American and Diaspora history, and American Studies. Trained in both U.S. and Japanese institutions, she has always taken comparative and transnational approaches in her studies. In all of her work, she explores how U.S. nationality and its related hierarchies were shaped by larger global circumstances at historically specific moments. Her book project is on geographies of black freedom in the eighteenth-and-nineteenth century Atlantic world. The work seeks to demonstrate how labor and territorial formations in the British and U.S. empires took shape around the question of the proper location of black freedom and how domesticity and reproduction were central to the imperial and colonial struggles over racial boundaries. Drawing partly from the book manuscript, she has written an article titled “‘Our Brethren in the West Indies’: Self-Emancipated People in Canada and the Antebellum Politics of Diaspora and Empire,” forthcoming in Journal of African American History (Summer 2012).

Ikuko Asaka received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a historian of the United States with an emphasis on women, gender, and sexuality, African American and Diaspora history, and American Studies. Trained in both U.S. and Japanese institutions, she has always taken comparative and transnational approaches in her studies. In all of her work, she explores how U.S. nationality and its related hierarchies were shaped by larger global circumstances at historically specific moments. Her book project is on geographies of black freedom in the eighteenth-and-nineteenth century Atlantic world. The work seeks to demonstrate how labor and territorial formations in the British and U.S. empires took shape around the question of the proper location of black freedom and how domesticity and reproduction were central to the imperial and colonial struggles over racial boundaries. Drawing partly from the book manuscript, she has written an article titled “‘Our Brethren in the West Indies’: Self-Emancipated People in Canada and the Antebellum Politics of Diaspora and Empire,” forthcoming in Journal of African American History (Summer 2012).

• Mellon Fellow, Institute for Research on Women (IRW) Scholar, and Postdoctoral Associate

• Aren Aizura received his PhD from Melbourne University, Australia in 2009. His research focuses on how biopolitical technologies of race, gender, transnationality, medicalization and political economy shape and are shaped by transgender and queer bodies. He is particularly interested in how geographical location and histories of colonialism have fostered or subtended different gender variant and queer subjectivities. His research to date has focused on diverse sites: the political economies of travel for gender reassignment surgery; tracing circuits of affective labor within trans and queer migration; writing about whiteness as a shifting ideal within transnational economies of body modification in Thailand; and interrogating concepts of homonationalism, biopolitics and necropolitics as they relate to gender variant life. His journal articles have appeared in Asian Studies Review, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies and Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness, while book chapters are included in Queer Bangkok (HKUP 2011), Trans Gender Migrations (Routledge, forthcoming 2011) and Trans Feminist Perspectives (Temple UP, forthcoming 2012). He is the co-editor with Susan Stryker of the Transgender Studies Reader Volume II (Routledge, forthcoming 2012).

Aren Aizura received his PhD from Melbourne University, Australia in 2009. His research focuses on how biopolitical technologies of race, gender, transnationality, medicalization and political economy shape and are shaped by transgender and queer bodies. He is particularly interested in how geographical location and histories of colonialism have fostered or subtended different gender variant and queer subjectivities. His research to date has focused on diverse sites: the political economies of travel for gender reassignment surgery; tracing circuits of affective labor within trans and queer migration; writing about whiteness as a shifting ideal within transnational economies of body modification in Thailand; and interrogating concepts of homonationalism, biopolitics and necropolitics as they relate to gender variant life. His journal articles have appeared in Asian Studies Review, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies and Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness, while book chapters are included in Queer Bangkok (HKUP 2011), Trans Gender Migrations (Routledge, forthcoming 2011) and Trans Feminist Perspectives (Temple UP, forthcoming 2012). He is the co-editor with Susan Stryker of the Transgender Studies Reader Volume II (Routledge, forthcoming 2012).

• Mellon Postdoctoral Associate, Institute for Research on Women (IRW) Scholar, in conjunction with the Women’s and Gender Studies Department

• Annie is a 2012 graduate of the Ethnic Studies Department with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, where she wrote a dissertation entitled Asian and Latina Migrants in the United States and the Invisible / Visible Paradigm of Human Trafficking. Her work explores the trafficking of Asian and Latinas/os into the United States from countries as diverse as Peru, Korea, and the Phillipines. Using case studies, she explores the shifting meaning of trafficking through a series of dichotomies (such as visibility/invisibility; victimhood/criminality). Her work makes scholarly interventions in the fields of Womens and Gender Studies, American studies, ethnic studies, media studies and law.

Annie is a 2012 graduate of the Ethnic Studies Department with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, where she wrote a dissertation entitled Asian and Latina Migrants in the United States and the Invisible / Visible Paradigm of Human Trafficking. Her work explores the trafficking of Asian and Latinas/os into the United States from countries as diverse as Peru, Korea, and the Phillipines. Using case studies, she explores the shifting meaning of trafficking through a series of dichotomies (such as visibility/invisibility; victimhood/criminality). Her work makes scholarly interventions in the fields of Womens and Gender Studies, American studies, ethnic studies, media studies and law.

• Mellon Fellow, Institute for Research on Women (IRW) Scholar, and Postdoctoral Associate

• Nadia Guessous received her PhD in anthropology from Columbia University in 2011. Her research interests include gender and feminism; the anthropology of progressive politics; religion and secularism; modern subjectivity; affect and viscerality; postcolonial feminist theory; the Middle East, North Africa, and Islam. Her book project describes the sense of anxiety, exhaustion, and disorientation that prevails among older leftist feminists in the wake of the Islamic Revival in contemporary Morocco. The book raises questions about the faith in the promises of secular modernity that undergirds this anxiety and argues that it gives rise to an exclusionary politics of avoidance which comes in the way of intergenerational exchange. The book contributes to thinking about feminism in non-teleological ways by highlighting some of the tragic consequences that can accompany the search for its realization. The project also seeks to think about the affect of politics and the centrality of embodiment to questions of modern subjectivity. Prior to joining Rutgers, Dr. Guessous was a Faculty Fellow at the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at NYU, where she taught graduate courses in anthropology and gender studies while directing the MA program. She was also a Five College Fellow in the department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Amherst College, where she taught on the anthropology of women and gender in the Middle East. She is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Award, an American Institute for Maghrib Studies Long Term Research grant, a Woodrow Wilson Foundation Women’s Studies Dissertation Fellowship, and a Five College Fellowship. She has published articles and book reviews in Confluences Méditerranée, The Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, and Jadaliyya; and has forthcoming articles in The Review of Middle East Studies and Arab Studies Journal.

Nadia Guessous received her PhD in anthropology from Columbia University in 2011. Her research interests include gender and feminism; the anthropology of progressive politics; religion and secularism; modern subjectivity; affect and viscerality; postcolonial feminist theory; the Middle East, North Africa, and Islam. Her book project describes the sense of anxiety, exhaustion, and disorientation that prevails among older leftist feminists in the wake of the Islamic Revival in contemporary Morocco. The book raises questions about the faith in the promises of secular modernity that undergirds this anxiety and argues that it gives rise to an exclusionary politics of avoidance which comes in the way of intergenerational exchange. The book contributes to thinking about feminism in non-teleological ways by highlighting some of the tragic consequences that can accompany the search for its realization. The project also seeks to think about the affect of politics and the centrality of embodiment to questions of modern subjectivity. Prior to joining Rutgers, Dr. Guessous was a Faculty Fellow at the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at NYU, where she taught graduate courses in anthropology and gender studies while directing the MA program. She was also a Five College Fellow in the department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Amherst College, where she taught on the anthropology of women and gender in the Middle East. She is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Award, an American Institute for Maghrib Studies Long Term Research grant, a Woodrow Wilson Foundation Women’s Studies Dissertation Fellowship, and a Five College Fellowship. She has published articles and book reviews in Confluences Méditerranée, The Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, and Jadaliyya; and has forthcoming articles in The Review of Middle East Studies and Arab Studies Journal.

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• ACLS Faculty Fellow and Postdoctoral Associate

• Yanoula Athanassakis received her Ph.D. in English (American Literature), with a Global Studies emphasis, from the University of California at Santa Barbara. Her interests include the politics of environmental justice, representations of immigration and the body in contemporary U.S. multi-ethnic literatures, global and transnational approaches to “American” texts, and theories of corporeality. Her book project dovetails with the transnational turn in American Studies and with emerging concerns of environmental justice. In her roles as Managing Editor for Special Forums for The Journal of Transnational American Studies (JTAS) and as Co-director of the UC Summer Study Abroad to Greece Program she works to keep her teaching and research relevant to an international audience. Her publications include poetry translations from English to demotic Greek of both more traditional and experimental, digital projects. She has published articles on psychosomatic trauma in U.S. literature, the intersection of postcolonial politics and transnational studies in the writing of Kiran Desai, and on filmic and literary representations of human rights violations on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Yanoula Athanassakis received her Ph.D. in English (American Literature), with a Global Studies emphasis, from the University of California at Santa Barbara. Her interests include the politics of environmental justice, representations of immigration and the body in contemporary U.S. multi-ethnic literatures, global and transnational approaches to “American” texts, and theories of corporeality. Her book project dovetails with the transnational turn in American Studies and with emerging concerns of environmental justice. In her roles as Managing Editor for Special Forums for The Journal of Transnational American Studies (JTAS) and as Co-director of the UC Summer Study Abroad to Greece Program she works to keep her teaching and research relevant to an international audience. Her publications include poetry translations from English to demotic Greek of both more traditional and experimental, digital projects. She has published articles on psychosomatic trauma in U.S. literature, the intersection of postcolonial politics and transnational studies in the writing of Kiran Desai, and on filmic and literary representations of human rights violations on the U.S.-Mexico border.