People

PhD Alumni Listing

PhD Alumni Listing

Falzetti, Ashley

Bio

Ashley received an M.A. in Women's and Gender Studies from Rutgers University in 2009 and an M.A. in Philosophy from the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee in 2006. She is currently an Assistant Professor in Women's and Gender Studies at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti. She is currently researching two new chapters for her book manuscript "Belonging in Myaamionki" on Miami Indian experiences of settler colonialism in the Lower Great Lakes. An article that draws from this research, "Archival Absence: the burdens of history," was recently published in Settler Colonial Studies (Winter 2015.) She teaches courses on interdisciplinary feminist methodologies, the co-constructions of race, gender, and nation, as well as the heteropatriarchy of colonialisms.

Abstract

Frances Slocum has become the most famous Miami Indian woman in history, which is surprising because she was born to a white Quaker family. This project traces the formation of her captivity narrative as she is transformed into a figure of local history in two distinct places: Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania where she was captured and Peru, Indiana where she lived and was buried. Settler Histories of Place examines the periods in which her narrative gains popularity and finds that her story circulates most widely at moments when there are broader movements to take control of Miami Indian lands in Indiana. How storytellers describe her racial identity shapes how she is imagined as a historical figure of settler and native history. What details are included or omitted shapes how the violence of settling the United States is imagined. Narratives about Frances Slocum are used in two particular regions as key historical stories of place. These stories use racial descriptions to naturalize a settler sense of belonging, normalizing settler claims to land inhabited by the Miami. Accounting for Miami perspectives of Frances Slocum disrupts settler narratives of Miami absence and reveals the cultural logics of public history in a settler-context.

Adda, Harnida

  • Job Placement: Lecturer, Universitas Tadulako, Palu, Central Sulawesi, Indonesia
  • Committee: Y. Rodgers, E. Brooks, R. Balakrishnan, D. Goldstein
  • Dissertation: Rural Home-based Self-Employment: Evidence from Central Sulawesi, Indonesia

Bio

Harnida Adda received a B.A. in Economics with a specialization in Human Resource Management from Tadulako University, Indonesia in 1999. She also received an MA in Women’s Studies from Flinders University, Australia in 2004. Her passion for women in managerial positions has inspired her to write an MA thesis entitled "A Question of Style: Gender and Management in Asian Countries," which enabled her to explore the issue of leadership styles of women executives in Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Philippines, and Indonesia.

She started her PhD in Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers in 2008 with a Fulbright Scholarship and completed the program in 2014. She is now back in her home country of Indonesia getting back to routine as a lecturer at her alma mater, Universitas Tadulako, Palu, Central Sulawesi. Apart from teaching, she also speaks locally on topics related to human resources management. She plans to undertake collaborative research with local governmental and non-governmental institutions centering on the topic of the development and sustainability of women's economic activities through home-based industries as a potential strategy for enhancing women's participation in both domestic and public spaces. She will also revise her dissertation into a book and some articles for publication in national and international journals. Last but not least, she is looking forward to undertaking post-doctorate opportunities.

Abstract

This study explores how women in Central Sulawesi of Indonesia experience power and value transformations through self-employment. Based on the subjective experience of female fried onion producers and sarong weavers, this study suggests that the integration of women into home-based industries generate benefits beyond economic survival. Self-employment has led women’s work to be recognized as “real work” and it has increased women’s personal capabilities. This change has led self-employed women to position themselves as partners of their husbands, as their voices have become more acknowledged at work and in the home. This study indicates the existence of a new dimension of rural women, as they have become agents of social change by participating in micro self-employment. These women have developed self-awareness of their personal resources and have attempted to create a new role for themselves by challenging and transforming the patriarchal structure of their households. Through their initiative and commitment to developing their income-earning capacities, these women have gained more respect and authority that enable them to participate more outspokenly in their families’ affairs due to the improved power relations between their husbands and themselves. Through conducting in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, and participant observations, this study shows that the contributions of rural women through home-based self-employment goes beyond the individual and her family; owners provide job opportunities for other women, and the choice of producing fried onions and weaving sarongs helps to preserve the specialties of the local culture. Rural women’s contribution through self-employment is valued beyond the material entity that these women bring in to their households. They have made the commitment to endure the risks of small-scale home-based micro-businesses as a way to diversify their family’s source of income. They have thereby increased their visibility in their own homes and in society. By embracing their strengths through self-employment, rural women have been able to overcome the power barriers that used to impede their advancement in economic and social lives. By using the cultural influences as one of motivations to engage in ‘non-traditional’ work, these women are continuing to improve their capabilities in the face of persistent challenges.

Tamura, Yurika

  • Job Placement: Clinical Assistant Professor at the School of Liberal Studies at New York University; (From 2023): Assistant Professor at the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of North Carolina
  • Webpage: https://chaocenter.rice.edu/Content.aspx?id=481
  • Committee: E. Grosz, A. Isaac, N. Rao, J. Murphy
  • Dissertation: Community of Non-Belonging, Bodies for Non-Philosophy: Interncultural Performance and a Sense of Coexistence

Bio

Yurika Tamura completed her PhD in 2013. She has taught courses on feminist theory, Asian American studies, and Japanese literature and film. Yurika's research interests include critical race theory, body and sensations, music and performance, and affect. In her dissertation project she experiments on writings on music, corporeality, and sensation.

Abstract

This dissertation studies music and stage performances led by contemporary Japanese minority groups, primarily Ainu activists, from three theoretical perspectives: 1. Politics of representation, 2. The body and materiality, and 3. Philosophy of difference. Each perspective informs each chapter’s study of the soundscape and performance produced in lieu of verbal political negotiation. Posed as a project in performance studies and critical race theory, the dissertation analyzes cultural and political contexts of each performance as well as affect of the impact of performance. By addressing political situations and history minority populations in Japan, and especially since most of the chapters address the issues of contemporary Ainu indigenous struggles, this project necessarily takes postcolonial and feminist approaches that criticize Japanese imperialism, colonialism, and ideological products of other disciplinary forms of nation-building, such as the social hierarchies based on race and gender. The performances introduced in this dissertation themselves, however, take remarkably positive approaches to conceiving differences of the bodies. Rather than reverting to traditional identity politics, their performance activism seeks a new way for the various bodies and sensations to occupy shared spaces. Thus by examining their inclusive politics that is marked by avoidance of political discussions and focus on the sound elements and music sensations to activate a space of coexistence, this dissertation explores how music and bodily sensations allow us to conceive new modes of coexistence by different bodies of people. Another question this dissertation pursues is how to conceive materiality of the body while many gender and cultural studies have studied the body as signs and symbols of identity, and not a corporeal substance. By aligning with the recent theoretical movement that focuses on the material body, this dissertation engages in theorization of the body that leverages innovative conceptualizations of living with others. Finally, the dissertation proposes the concept of “Transnational Indigeneity,” an indigenous theorization that locates indigeneity outside and beyond national and racial borders and critiques such imperial exclusions and markings of bodies and the earth. The dissertation describes how transnational indigeneity is materialized in the new Ainu collaborative music scenes through the sound and sensations.

Hernandez, Jillian

  • Assistant Professor
  • Department: University of Florida
  • Job Placement: Associate Professor, Center for Gender, Sexualities and Women’s Studies Research, University of Florida
  • Webpage: https://people.clas.ufl.edu/jillianhernandez/
  • Committee: L. Schein, C. Decena, A. Stein, S. Sidlauskas, A. Cheng
  • Dissertation: The Politics of Sexual Aesthetics: Women and Girls Crafting Bodies

Bio

Jillian received her PhD in Women's and Gender Studies in May 2013. She was awarded a Dissertation Fellowship from the American Association of University Women for her research: “The Politics of Sexual Aesthetics: Women and Girls Crafting Bodies.” Jillian's research projects focus on contemporary art, sexualities, and girls’ studies. She was formerly Curatorial Associate at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami where she created the nationally acclaimed “Women on the Rise!” outreach program for teen girls. She has organized several exhibitions of contemporary art and published essays in her areas of interest.

Abstract

The Power of Sexual Aesthetics: Women and Girls Crafting Bodies examines how people of color respond creatively to being framed as sexually deviant through normative assessments of their corporeal styles in the U.S. This work comprises a comparative study of how aesthetics shape the racialization of African American, Latina, and black, non-Latina Caribbean immigrant women and girls. The dissertation constructs its argument by juxtaposing the body crafting practices of heterosexual and LBTQ young women of color I have worked with through community arts outreach, with contemporary women artists of color whose work portrays explicitly raced and sexualized bodies. Employing a multi-method approach, the study combines focus groups with young women, interviews with artists, reception study, and visual analysis of music videos, YouTube media, photographs, collages, and paintings, to fashion a transdisciplinary synthesis. Bridging Art History, Gender, Sexuality, African American, Latino/a, Critical Race, Ethnic, and Cultural Studies, the dissertation traces the circulation of raced female bodies in the visual fields of popular culture, fine art, and everyday social spaces, domains in which norms of body presentation and representation are both crystallized and challenged. Case studies of “chonga” girls, masculine body presenting young women, and contemporary cultural producers elaborate the modes through which racialized corporeal aesthetics are valued. This project highlights a double standard: vernacular images and embodiments of sexuality fashioned by disadvantaged girls more often draw negative critiques and cultural devaluation in social discourse when compared to more professional pictures and bodies lauded as “edgy” and “innovative” for their sexual content in the elite art world, popular culture, and media. The Power of Sexual Aesthetics analyzes how body crafting practices may work to both reveal and occult class disparity in a contemporary neoliberal context. The power of neoliberal discourse lies in its obfuscation of class exclusions and structures, and effective circulation of narratives concerning the putative potential of self-making and overcoming economic circumstances. This dissertation argues that the dissident aesthetics of poor and working class women and girls of color have the potential to unmask realities of class stratification, hence their disciplining as racially, sexually, and aesthetically excessive.

Gorman, Cynthia

  • Job Placement: Associate Professor of Geography and Women’s and Gender Studies, West Virginia University
  • Webpage: http://geography.wvu.edu/people/faculty/cynthia-gorman
  • Committee: J. Regulska, R. Rodriguez, C. Lee, C. Bunch
  • Dissertation: From Recognition to Regulation: Flood Fears, Gender Violence, and Asylum Law in the United States

Bio

Cynthia Gorman received a B.A. in Political Science from Bates College and an M.A. in Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers University. While at Rutgers, Cynthia directed the Community Leadership Action and Service Project (CLASP) at the Institute for Women's Leadership, a program which she developed through her Master's practicum with the Institute.

After completing her PhD in 2013, Cynthia worked as an Instructor of Leadership Studies at West Virginia University. Her research focuses on the gender politics of nationalisms, the geopolitical context of human rights discourse, refugee-asylum law in the post-Cold War era, and the development of gender-based persecution jurisprudence in the United States. Other interests include community-based activism and feminist pedagogies.

Abstract

Over the past twenty years, women’s human rights advocates have made significant gains in securing protection for women with gender-related claims of persecution within the United States. However, efforts to expand the legal rubric of refugee-asylum law to include gender-related forms of persecution have aroused controversy about inviting a flood of women from around the world fleeing gender violence. In this dissertation, I explore how fears of a flood of women asylum seekers have shaped the development of gender-based asylum jurisprudence in the United States. While it is envisioned as carrying out a humanitarian mandate, refugee asylum law continues to be embedded in and responsive to state efforts to systematically control the movement of populations across its territorial borders and to screen out asylum seekers deemed to threaten the composition of the nation. Through particular technologies of exclusion justified by flood fears, state actors undermined cases that could open pathways to citizenship for large numbers of migrants. Employing a methodology of feminist legal archeology combined with interviews of impact litigators, I demonstrate how efforts by feminist legal advocates to expand asylum protection to include gender-based persecution became entangled in efforts by state immigration officials and adjudicators to exclude particular women from protection. Thus despite the humanitarian commitments of refugee-asylum law and feminist legal advocates’ success in winning recognition of gender-based persecution, fears of an impending flood of refugees have resulted in exclusionary definitions of who can gain asylum on the basis of gender-based persecution.

Dhar, Debotri

Bio

Debotri Dhar received a B.A. in Economics (Honors) from Delhi University, India, and a Masters with distinction in Women’s Studies from University of Oxford, UK, before earning her Ph.D in Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers. She is currently a full-time lecturer in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Debotri has published book chapters, essays, and articles in journals such as Postcolonial Text, Feminist Formations, and Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy. She has edited and introduced numerous volumes including Education and Gender (Bloomsbury Academic: London, New York, New Delhi), Love is not a Word: The Culture and Politics of Desire (Speaking Tiger: New Delhi), and The Best Asian Short Stories (Kitaab, Singapore). Her monograph on sexual violence and the state is forthcoming from Routledge (London, New York, New Delhi), and she is working on her next. Dr. Dhar has served as an expert panelist for the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships and a reviewer for the National Women's Studies Association, among others. Debotri also writes books in the genres of fiction and creative non-fiction, as well as articles on gender issues for popular publications, and has served as a judge for the Barbara Deming Fund for women writers (New York). She has spoken on television and radio, to communicate on gender issues with a wider audience, and lent her interdisciplinary expertise to organizations across sectors.

Sameh, Catherine

  • Job Placement: Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at UC Irvine
  • Webpage: http://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=6091
  • Committee: E. Brooks, J. Puar, J. Regulska, O. Alidou
  • Dissertation: Signatures, Rights, Networks: Iranian Feminism in the Transnational Sphere

Bio

In July 2010, Catherine Sameh was hired as Associate Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women. She was responsible for the Center's media productions, including the well-respected webjournal Scholar & Feminist Online. She was also in charge of transnational collaborations with peer centers globally. Catherine's work at the Barnard Center for Research on Women drawed on her expertise on transnational feminism developed in her dissertation. In May 2014, Catherine accepted a tenure-track position in the Gender & Sexuality Studies Department at UC Irvine.

Abstract

My dissertation explores how Iranian feminists are mobilizing new discourses and creating dynamic transnational networks, enabled in part by cyber and print cultures. I investigate the ways in which Iranian feminist praxis consequently disrupts and reframes the putative opposition between secularism and Islam, and the multiple binaries assembled through this opposition—democratic versus authoritarian; liberatory versus oppressive; egalitarian versus patriarchal; and modern versus backwards. Within a multimethodological and interdisciplinary framework, I examine three sites of Iranian feminist activism. I consider the One Million Signatures Campaign, a grassroots feminist movement that emerged in Iran in 2006, which utilizes Islamic human rights discourses and grassroots, democratic practices to engage the state in reforming family law. I also investigate the transnational network structure of the campaign, reflecting on the particular praxis offered by campaigners in the Iranian diaspora. Finally, I examine the writings and reception of Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi. As a Muslim, feminist and human rights activist, Ebadi emphasizes the compatibility of Islam with human rights, thereby disrupting discourses that counterpoise them. Considered together, these three sites of Iranian feminism destabilize Western hegemony over Iran, consolidated through discourses which pit “superior” liberal democracies over “backward” Islamic nations. This oppositional staging gains purchase through geopolitical relations of power, including some iterations of global feminism, which deploy neocolonial saving and rescue narratives in the name of women’s human rights. Concomitantly, transnational feminist theory, which has destabilized the normative authority of Western hegemony and global feminism, can also often reify the very power relations it seeks to critique. By emphasizing the dangers, limits, and dilemmas of transnational feminist work, transnational feminist theory can neglect critical feminist projects on the ground, effectively writing some women out of history. My dissertation considers how Iranian feminists in Iran and the diaspora challenge these various modes of epistemic silencing. Through a close examination of the praxis of Iranian feminists, reflected primarily through the narratives of the activists themselves, my dissertation contributes to feminist theories of agency and helps revitalize transnational feminist studies.

Garrido, Anahi R.

Bio

 

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the transformation of intimacy in the lives of three generations of women participating in queer spaces in Mexico City, at a moment in which sexual citizenship is being redefined in Mexican society. More specifically, this research considers how the social organization, discourses and practices of intimacy have shifted for women participating in queer spaces in Mexico City since the 1960s. My study looks at how the emergence of these transcontinental debates intertwines with the new nationalist rhetoric that has proclaimed Mexico as a pluriethnic and multicultural (instead of mestizo) nation. After positioning these debates in processes of national identity and transnational dynamics, I explore through my ethnographic data, how gay and lesbian individuals in Mexico City have reconfigured their views on intimacy (i.e. love, friendship, sexuality) since the 1960s, and in particular in the midst of these changes on sexual citizenship. I focus particularly on women participating in queer spaces. I suggest that if we truly are to understand queer lives in Latin America, it is imperative to engage with discourses on intimacy produced through the State and other institutional actors and the ways in which these are experienced, rather than primarily centering our analysis on ontological questions as research on same-sex sexuality in Latin America and the Caribbean has continuously emphasized. My qualitative research is based on ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in Mexico City for 10 months in 2009-2010, including participant observation, 45 qualitative interviews and the review of newspapers of record. It is also influenced by seven intermittent years of everyday life in Mexico City since 1998 and a previous anthropological fieldwork research in 2000. Ultimately, my study contributes to the fields of the anthropology and sociology of intimacy, interdisciplinary studies on gender and sexuality in Latin America and notions of sexual citizenship, nationalism, space and place.

Thomas, Sonja

  • From Chattas to Churidars: Syrian Christian Religious Minorities in a Secular Indian State
  • Job Placement: Associate Professor, WGSS, Colby College
  • Webpage: http://www.colby.edu/directory/profile/sonja.thomas/
  • Committee: E. Brooks, J. Puar, E. Grosz, P. Kurien

Bio

Sonja Thomas completed her Ph.D. in Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers in May 2011. Her dissertation, “From Chattas to Churidars: Syrian Christian Religious Minorities in a Secular Indian State,” examined the larger questions of how socially constructed differences between women shape their capacity to create feminist networks and to act towards social change. Her research specifically analyzed the Syrian Christian community of Kerala, India and the intersectional social identities of the religious community; a Christian religious minority identity, an Aryan racial identity, and a high-caste Brahmin identity. From the chatta, a clothing worn in pre-independence India by Syrian Christian women alone, to the churidar worn today by women of all castes, races and religions, her dissertation attempted to understand the complex histories and differences between South Asian people. Sonja accepted a tenure-track assistant professor position at Colby College.

Abstract

This dissertation is a critical analysis of the feminist concept of intersectionality and a necessary contribution into the study of caste, class, race, religion and gender in South Asia. Rather than viewing identities as merely overlapping, I argue that there exist countless “acts” that implicate the co-constitutive, relational, and fluid nature of identities. Particularly focusing on the upper-caste Syrian Christian community in postcolonial Kerala, India, I examine “acts” in the form of embodied clothing practices, women’s mobility in public spaces and political protests. My dissertation especially intervenes into dominant discourses within South Asian and Women’s and Gender Studies. I reassess of the concept of race in South Asia, provide a sustained ethnographic and historical analysis of the state of Kerala, India, and I place the fields of South Asian and Women’s and Gender Studies into critical dialogue with each other. To make these interventions, I use a variety of sources collected through interdisciplinary research methods. These methods include ethnography, archival methods, feminist and postcolonial theoretical analysis, and visual culture analysis. In the first and second chapters of the dissertation, I provide an overview of the dissertation, my field site and a history of the Syrian Christian community. In the third and fourth chapters I explore the relations between class, caste, race, religion and gender through an examination of the women’s (in)ability to move freely in a changing public sphere. Following this, in chapters five and six I analyze how Syrian Christians have used their social privileges to politically mobilize, define a nation-wide minority identity, and protect their dominance in Kerala’s private education sector. In the last chapter, I bridge Women’s and Gender Studies with South Asian Studies and examine each of the disciplines’ approach to studying differences between peoples in India. From the chatta, a clothing worn in colonial Kerala by Syrian Christian women alone, to the churidar worn today by women of all classes, castes, races and religions, I examine how “acts” of class, caste, race, religion and gender may continue previous divisions between groups, justifying forms of oppression and ultimately upholding systems of domination in India today.

Rotramel, Ariella

  • Job Placement: Vandana Shiva Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies, Connecticut College
  • Webpage: https://www.conncoll.edu/directories/faculty-profiles/ariella-rotramel/
  • Committee: N.Hewitt (Chair), B.Balliet, J.Gerson, R. Rodriguez, J. D’Emilio
  • Dissertation: Pushing Back: Women-Led Grassroots Activism in New York City’s Transnational Communities of Color, 1986-2011

Bio

Ariella received a B.A. from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2003 and completed her PhD in Fall 2011. She accepted the position of Visiting Assistant Professor in Gender and Women's Studies at Connecticut College. While at Rutgers, she studied women-led community organizing efforts by New York’s Mothers on the Move and CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities. Ariella taught undergraduate courses in women's and gender studies and social justice.

Abstract

“Pushing Back” analyzes women-led activism of transnational communities of color through an examination of social justice campaigns around domestic work, housing, and environmental policies and practices. Through a case study of New York City from the 1980s to the present (2011), the dissertation argues that one key to progressive women’s successful organizing efforts is their ability to draw upon a range of political stances and to cross traditional identity-based boundaries. This study addresses three central questions: Which issues do organizations representing transnational communities of color identify as key to their communities and how do they frame them? What forms of advocacy do they wield and what do such approaches look like in practice? and How do they negotiate internal diversity (gender, race/nationality, class, etc.) and engage the broader community, particularly as women-led groups? The study focuses on two grassroots organizations, the pan-Asian/American CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities and the South Bronx’s largely Puerto Rican and Black Mothers on the Move/Madres en Movimiento. A complex picture of activism is produced through original archival research in previously unprocessed papers at each organization, oral history interviews, participant-observation, and the evaluation of relevant governmental and media sources.

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