PhD Alumni Listing

• Job Placement: Associate Professor, English, Speech and Foreign Languages, Texas Women’s University
• Webpage: http://www.twu.edu/ws/phillips.asp
• Committee: N. Hewitt; A. Ramos-Zayas; E. Brooks
• Dissertation: Global Formations of Race in Close Quarters: Irish and African American Domestic Workers in New York, 1888-1940Global Formations of Race in Close Quarters: Irish and African American Domestic Workers in New York, 1888-1940

Bio

Danielle received a B.A. in Comparative Women’s Studies from Spelman College and completed her PhD in 2010. She accepted a tenure-track position in Women's Studies at Texas Woman's University.

Abstract

My dissertation investigates the experiences of southern African American women migrating to New York after emancipation and Irish women, who became heavily concentrated in domestic service positions there as a result of the migration that followed the devastating potato famines of the 1840s and 1850s. Although both groups of women were clearly marginalized because of their racial, gender, and class status, they moved to the center of debates about the meanings of citizenship, blackness, non-whiteness, whiteness, and the ideals of domesticity in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. As southern Black, immigrant, and white women came into greater contact in the domestic sphere, the supposed “bedrock” of American civilization, it became a site of contention as groups negotiated modes of power and definitions of who was white and who was an “American.” Native-born white employers and Irish and southern African American domestic workers used personal interactions, letters to the editor, satirical images, and newspaper and journal articles as platforms to construct identities that would allow them to claim the material and ideological promises of the “American Dream.” Debates about the “domestic service problem” in New York City did not occur in isolation, of course. Harper’s Bazaar and other periodicals carried these discussions overseas, featuring transnational conversations between employers in the U.S. and London who exchanged tips about how to deal with the “belligerent” domestic workers who were “invading” their homes and providing “inadequate” service. This study also examines how Black intellectuals including W.E.B. Du Bois and Anna Julia Cooper inserted their own theoretical contributions into this global debate about domestic service and the particular interaction between Irish and southern African American female laborers in the North. My dissertation investigates the experiences of southern African American women migrating to New York after emancipation and Irish women, who became heavily concentrated in domestic service positions there as a result of the migration that followed the devastating potato famines of the 1840s and 1850s. Although both groups of women were clearly marginalized because of their racial, gender, and class status, they moved to the center of debates about the meanings of citizenship, blackness, non-whiteness, whiteness, and the ideals of domesticity in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. As southern Black, immigrant, and white women came into greater contact in the domestic sphere, the supposed “bedrock” of American civilization, it became a site of contention as groups negotiated modes of power and definitions of who was white and who was an “American.” Native-born white employers and Irish and southern African American domestic workers used personal interactions, letters to the editor, satirical images, and newspaper and journal articles as platforms to construct identities that would allow them to claim the material and ideological promises of the “American Dream.” Debates about the “domestic service problem” in New York City did not occur in isolation, of course. Harper’s Bazaar and other periodicals carried these discussions overseas, featuring transnational conversations between employers in the U.S. and London who exchanged tips about how to deal with the “belligerent” domestic workers who were “invading” their homes and providing “inadequate” service. This study also examines how Black intellectuals including W.E.B. Du Bois and Anna Julia Cooper inserted their own theoretical contributions into this global debate about domestic service and the particular interaction between Irish and southern African American female laborers in the North.

• Job Placement: Professor, School of Language Sciences, Universidad del Valle, Santiago de Cali, Colombia
• Webpage: http://lenguaje.univalle.edu.co/index.php/escuela/personal-escuela/profesores/28-profesores-nombrados/72-susana-matallana
• Committee: T. Kaplan, N. Hewitt, C. Decena, C.Townsend, M. Francis
• Dissertation: Spotlight on the Indians: What Ysavel Agad might have told Captain (1535-1629) Ospina or the First One-Hundred Years After the Spanish conquest of the Alto Magdalena Region

Bio

Susana Matallana received an M.A. in English from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She completed her Ph.D. in Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers in May 2011.

Abstract

This study traces the first one-hundred years after the Spanish conquest of the Alto Magdalena Region (1535-1629) in present-day Colombia. In doing so, it focuses primarily on the indigenous actors – male and female, local and non-local – who took part in one way or another in this enterprise. As such it is based on the analysis of twenty-two unpublished archival documents dating from 1540 through 1669. This study argues that Belalcázar‟s Yanacona (Inca) allies played a major role in the conquest and colonization of the Alto Magdalena region, and that Yanacona women were an important part of this expedition. It also argues that Belalcázar and his troops encountered local matrilineal societies (Yalcones, Panches, Coyaimas, Natagaimas, Pixaos) in which women held significant political power, and that a local female (Yalcón) leader by the name of Guatepán may have given rise to the legend of La Gaitana. With regards to the wars of resistance that took place between the second half of the sixteenth century through the beginning of the seventeenth century, it claims that local indigenous groups such as the Coyaimas and Natagaimas who sided with the Spanish were instrumental in defeating the Pixao Indians who were the principal leaders of the revolts. Along this line, it contends that the vicious and “fratricidal” wars between the Indians who sided with the Spanish and those who sided against them were a decisive factor for Spanish victory. In addition it purports to show that local indigenous shamans known as mohanes were in fact politico-religious leaders who were persecuted by Spanish authorities not for religious but for political reasons, and more specifically for their role as leaders of the resistance. Finally, it argues that the wars that ensued after the Spanish incursion destroyed the social networks on which so much of local women‟s power was based, and that as a result, local indigenous women lost much of their traditional power and status.

• Job Placement: Executive Director, Kudumbashree State Poverty Eradication Mission, Kerala, India
• Committee: L. Fernandes, D. Hodgson, E. Brooks, P. Swaminathan
• Dissertation: Microcredit as a Poverty Alleviation Strategy, Women's Empowerment and Gender Relations

Bio

Valsala Kumari defended her dissertation in 2011. After completion, she continued working as Secretary to the Government of Kerala, India, in the Labor and Employment Department. She served as the Director of the Social Welfare Department in charge of Women and Children in Kerala state for 3 years and was subsequently appointed as Secretary of the Statutory Women's Commission of Kerala for 2 years. In 1999 she was the recipient of the Hubert H. Humphrey Fellowship awarded by the US Government for mid-career professionals with proven track record of leadership. Under the auspices of the Humphrey Fellowship, she completed a Masters in Planning and Urban Development at the Bloustein School of Rutgers University. She also completed an M.A. in Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers.

Abstract

This dissertation is about how women are empowered when they gain access to small loans (microcredit) and how that alters or reinforces existing gender relations. My study shows that “the poor” is not a monolithic entity but is an aggregation of differentiated categories with the most vulnerable segments of society occupying the lowest rung of society. The state-civil society synergy that is so characteristic of the state of Kerala does not percolate down to the poorest and most vulnerable segments of society and the tribes for a variety of reasons. If these segments of the population have to benefit, the structure of microcredit has to be redesigned to make it more appropriate and responsive to their special needs. Microcredit provides the entry point but it is the networking that empowers impoverished women who lack material resources. Networking itself is an umbrella term that entails different kinds of networking. My conclusion is that the women-centric microcredit program sponsored by the state marks a departure from the earlier paradigms of developments in which women were not placed at the center of developmental activities. The new paradigm is the state’s attempt at negotiating privatized strategies of development in the larger context of liberalization espoused by the Indian state. My study reveals that microcredit does help women tide over the emergency needs of the family without relying on others. But it is not a substitute for long term structural problems of poverty. The social solidarity generated by different kinds of networking helps women’s empowerment by way of expanding their consciousness through new knowledge including legal literacy and through exposure to other people with other ideals and ethics. I also find that the social capital generated by the networking of over 3.7 million women through self help groups has not transformed into organized demand cutting across party politics for radical changes like redistribution of resources especially arable land. Microcredit has functioned to depoliticize what could have been a progressive politics for gender equity.

• Job Placement: Associate Professor of English at University of Washington
• Committee: E. Grosz, H. Davidson, C. Decena
• Dissertation: Earthly Encounters: Readings in Poststructuralism, Feminist Theory, and Canadian Settler Colonialism

Bio

Stephanie Clare is an interdisciplinary scholar who works at the intersections of feminist and queer theory, settler colonial studies, and science studies. She has taught at Rutgers University, the University of Oxford, and Duke University in multiple departments: from English to Philosophy, from African and African American Studies to Women’s Studies. She is currently writing a book manuscript, Earthly Encounters. The book examines relations between subjectivity and territory, land and the earth in twentieth-century world literature and philosophy, focusing especially on Canada. Her work has appeared in Diacritics, GLQ, differences, and Hypatia.

Abstract

This dissertation draws out a point of resonance between Frantz Fanon’s and Luce Irigaray’ philosophies: Fanon and Irigaray demonstrate how the philosophy of difference– be it racial and/or sexual difference – and the philosophy of power relations – be it the analysis of patriarchy and/or colonialism – not only bring attention to racialized and gendered others, they also bring attention to land and the earth. In both authors’ works, abstract, homogenous empty space comes to the foreground, filled with the matter that constitutes it: earth, air, and land. The dissertation draws on Fanon’s and Irigaray’s treatment of space to reconsider central concepts that circulate in poststructuralist feminist thought: power, discourse, interiority, subjectivity, and sexuality. I read these concepts within the context of Canadian settler colonialism to foreground the politics of space. Most centrally, I argue that alongside the forms of power Michel Foucault analyzed at length exists another form of power, geopower, the force relations that transform the earth. I describe geopower through an analysis of the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railroad. Ultimately, “Earthly Encounters” contributes to feminist, antiracist thought by bringing attention not simply to sexual or racial difference but also to the material differences that make up our world: animal, plant, and mineral.

• Job Placement: Associate Professor & Director of Master’s Program, English, Speech and Foreign Languages, Texas Women’s University
• Webpage: http://www.twu.edu/ws/beins.asp
• Committee: J. Regulska, H. Davidson, N. Hewitt
• Dissertation: Free Our Sisters, Free Ourselves: Locating U.S. Feminism through Feminist Periodicals, 1970-1983

Bio

Agatha Beins received a B.A. in Classical Languages from Carleton College, an M.A. in Women’s Studies from University of Arizona, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing and Poetry from Eastern Washington University. She completed her PhD in 2011, and accepted a tenure-track position at the Texas Woman's University. Agatha is a co-editor of the anthology Women's Studies for the Future. Her dissertation explored the production and consumption of U.S. feminist periodicals published in the 1970s.

Abstract

In 1968 the first feminist periodicals associated with the second wave of U.S. feminism appeared in the United States, and by 1973 over five hundred different feminist newsletters, newspapers, and literary journals had been published. Although these periodicals often had erratic publication schedules and rarely ran more than a few years, their proliferation during this time period shows that publishing was vital to the women’s liberation movement. Not only did periodicals create a space for women to describe experiences, develop theories, debate politics, and exchange ideas, they also connected women through their circulation, producing an imagined community of feminists at local and global scales. Free Our Sisters, Free Ourselves: Locating U.S. Feminism through Feminist Periodicals, 1970-1983 examines the U.S. feminist movement through the production and consumption of feminist newsletters and newspapers. Focusing on periodicals published in five cities (New Orleans, Louisiana; Northampton, Massachusetts; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Iowa City, Iowa; and Los Angeles, California), this dissertation tracks the circulation of ideas to explore how feminism as a collective identity was produced and reproduced. Based on archival research throughout the country and an analysis of the circulation and repetition of language and images as well as on the effects of modes of periodical production, this dissertation draws from a wide range of literatures, including history, sociology, geography, cultural studies, visual studies, and history of the book, as well as from feminist theories about power and identity. I argue that during the 1970s feminist periodicals were vital to the production not just of feminism’s present and presence but also of feminism’s past and future. Periodicals additionally contributed to the discursive and material existence of the women’s liberation movement, allowing feminism’s past, present, and future to be imaginable as well as physically locatable.

• Job Placement: Chairperson, Essex County College
• Committee: D. Sifuentes, C. Decena, Y. Martinez, L. Stokes
• Dissertation: Admission as Submission: Richard Rodriquez's Autobiographies as an Epistemology of Penetration

Bio

Christopher Rivera completed his interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers University in August 2009. A recipient of the Southern Regional Education Board Dissertation Fellowship, in 2009 he secured a position for one year as Visiting Assistant Professor in race/ethnicity studies in the Comparative American Studies Program at Oberlin College, Ohio. In 2010 he was offered a position as Assistant Professor of American Culture and Literature, Department of American Culture and Literature, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey.

Abstract

My dissertation is a study and contextualization of the three ethnic autobiographies of Chicano public intellectual Richard Rodriguez, The Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982), Days of Obligation: An Argument with my Mexican Father (1992), and Brown: The Last Discovery of America (2003). Since the publication of Hunger of Memory, Rodriguez is identified as being against political programs like affirmative action or a “poster boy” for right-wing politics. I argue for a more critical approach to Rodriguez’s controversial role in Chicana/o and Latina/o literary and cultural studies. I explore the evolution of the author-protagonist, Richard, and highlight how his struggles are exemplary of postcolonial subjects negotiating their way through Americanization. Assimilation produces psychosexual discourses that I analyze as particular to a colonized subject’s identity that is ambivalently positioned as at once typically American yet always outside the definition of what it means to be “authentically American.” Building upon Octavio Paz’s “penetration paradigm” and expanding the implicit queer reading of la chingada and el rajado metaphors defined in Laberinto de la soledad (1950), my project articulates how the concepts of penetration, rejection, and ambivalence become strategies of resistance postcolonial subjects manipulate in pursuit of (in)authentic Americanism. Spanning the U.S.-Mexican border, Rodriguez narrates the location the deviant, brown subject assumes in historical and present narratives of nation formation. Rodriguez presents a colonized American subject who openly defends and explores various ambivalent processes of acculturation and assimilation. Instead of adhering to Paz’s notion of impervious national masculinity, Rodriguez narrates his experiences as prototypical of the life of a deviant and dark subject who acknowledges the benefits and losses of openly admitting to inhabiting ambivalent locations in culture. Recognizing the relationship nations and individuals have with their ambivalence regarding penetration and rejection becomes crucial because admission is read as submission in the epistemology of penetration that my project delineates. Through close reading the autobiographies of Rodriguez, I identity a subtext of desire; it is a desire for memory, for the creation of alternative narratives and alternative spaces for postcolonial American life and subjectivity.

• Job Placement: Researcher at the Academy of Philosophy and Social Science, Warsaw, Poland
• Committee: J. Regulska, T. Kaplan, M. Hawkesworth, A. Snitow
• Dissertation: Polish Feminism Between East and West: The Formation of the Polish Women's Movement Identity

Bio

Magda Grabowska completed her Ph.D. in Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers in April 2009. Utilizing interdisciplinary methods of feminist story telling, discourse analysis, and participant observation, Magda’s work contributed to ongoing debates on transnational feminism, cultural politics, sexual strangeness and the politics of location, and addressed the question of how Eastern European feminism fits into ongoing formulation and reformulation of global gender theory. Madga Grabowska joined the Women's and Gender Studies faculty at The College of New Jersey before accepting a 2 year Marie Curie Postdoc at the University of Warsaw, Poland, funded by the EU. Magda is now Research Professor at the Polish Academy of Philosophy and Social Science.

Abstract

By focusing on the unique forces that shape women’s movements in the post-communist context, this dissertation asks if the established geopolitical and theoretical frameworks, based on dichotomies between East and West, South and North can be utilized outside these locations. Or is a new framework necessary to fully understand the specific processes that are at work in the ambiguous “Second” World location? Chapter One, traces the individual and collective trajectories of Polish women’s movement to the 19th century anti-partition mobilizations, the Second World War, the 1968 students’ liberation movement, the “Solidarity” labor union, and the 1990s Polish debate on abortion. Chapter Two identifies two elements as crucial for the unique development of transnational activism in the context of CEE: 1) its trajectory (“late” arrival into the international feminist space) and 2) the domination and critique of the EU “gender mainstreaming” paradigm within gender social justice discourses. Chapter Three recognizes the 1990s “abortion debate” became in impulse for the feminisms to move beyond the borders of the conservative nation state and bring the question of women’s sexual rights into the supranational political spaces and became a momentum for the emergence of versatile, vibrant mobilizations for gender and sexual justice in Poland and (e.g. European Court of Justice decision in the case of Alicja Tysiac against the Polish state). Chapter Four argues that secularism that had become, a necessary feminist response to violent and oppressive discourses that act to restrict women’s sexualities and rights, has also hindered feminist connectivity with religious women. In Poland a purification of the sexuality, emergence of the “political Catholicism” and “secular feminism” produced the subaltern, traveling identities of Catholic feminists. Chapter Five examines re-appropriation of the Anti-Semitic language of civic strangeness, historically represented by Polish Jews to the experience of sexual minorities. In conclusion this dissertation delineates two factors as decisive for current positionality of the “Second” world in the transnational feminist theory and practice: the rejection of Marxism as representing the colonial practices from the East (Russia, Soviet Union), the priotization of the supranational engagements with the European Union and Western Europe rather then Third World.

• Job Placement: Educator, National Nurses United/Institute for Health and Socio-Economic Policy (2011-Present) Visiting Assistant Professor, Women’s and Gender Studies Program, Eastern Washington University (2011) Lecturer, Women’s and Gender Studies Program, Eastern Washington University (2009-2011)
• Committee: M. Hawkesworth, E. Grosz, F. Bartkowski, J. Gerson, D. Liebowitz
• Dissertation: Feminist Scholarship: Excavating the Archive

Bio

Kelly Coogan-Gehr received a B.A. in Women’s Studies from Duke University in 2002, and she participated in the post-graduate course “Feminist Critical Analysis: Be/longing and Citizenship” offered through the Inter-University Centre, Dubrovnik, Croatia, in 2005. She defended her dissertation, "Feminist Scholarship: Excavating the Archive" in September 2009.

Abstract

My dissertation addresses the question of how feminist scholars define their field of inquiry. Most feminist scholars rely on a stock narrative of the history of feminist scholarship, which purportedly defines its processes and outcomes by decades—the white liberal feminist 1970s; the women-of-color, postmodern 1980s; and the poststructuralist, difference-focused 1990s, which they assume is adequate. My contention is that this stock narrative fails to adequately grapple with the complicated mix of forces that came together, and continuously collaborate, to create the event of feminist scholarship’s emergence. This emergence is the object of investigation for this dissertation. The study of emergence includes not only that which is visible and tangible about feminist scholarship in terms of its central ideas, concepts, theories, epistemologies, and methodologies, but also that which is not immediately or readily visible, such as the field’s animating intellectual and philosophical presuppositions and their relationships to time, space, temporality, and geography.

Identifying and demonstrating the deficiencies of the stock narrative of feminist scholarship, my dissertation develops several alternative accounts of feminist scholarship in its formation, contrasting the explanatory possibilities of approaches drawn from the history of ideas, the sociology of knowledge, and the Foucauldian archaeology. These three alternate accounts illuminate intricate and unexpected connections between academic feminism and geopolitical forces such as the Cold War, increased federal funding for higher education, changing priorities within philanthropic foundations, the emergence of development studies, area studies, and subfields such as Women in Development and Gender and Development. By complicating the narrative history of interdisciplinary feminist studies, the dissertation is able to offer a fresh interpretation of the centrality to academic feminism, particularly in postcolonial and transnational feminist scholarship, of key concepts advanced by U.S. scholars of color.

• Women and Gender in the Maoist People's War in Nepal: Militarism and Dislocation
• Job Placement: Assistant Professor, Psychology & Sociology, Union County College
• Committee: E. Grosz, L. Ahearn, B. Balliet, N.Fermen, J. Diamond
• Dissertation: Women and Gender in the Maoist People's War in Nepal: Militarism and Dislocation

Bio

Rama Lohani Chase was the second doctoral student in Women's and Gender Studies to successfully defend her dissertation. Rama's dissertation explored changing gender dynamics during crisis and armed conflict to see how global trends in movements of people, labor, and capital impact the appropriation and production of gender at the local level. Her work focused on the decade long (1996-2006) "People's War" in Nepal and the effects of three key processes -- militarization, displacement, and gender emobdiment -- on Nepali women.

Abstract

This dissertation explores changing gender dynamics during crisis and armed conflict to see how global/transnational movements of people, labor, and capital impact the appropriation and production of gender at the local level. The decade long (1996-2006) "People's War" in Nepal produced three key processes -- militarization, displacement, and altered embodiments of gender -- that impacted Nepali women and society. Through a study of women's position in Nepali political and cultural history and multi-sited ethnographic research on the People's War, the dissertation examines how crisis induced displacement and violence impacted and shaped gender dynamics at the local level and Nepali people's mobility at the transnational/global level. The latter has enabled the concept of a "Nepali diaspora" to be more visible and political, which is a strategy of survival appropriated by the globally dispersed Nepalis as their homeland reels under crisis and violence and as Nepalis continue to leave for work as migrant laborers. A close look at women's participation in the Maoist war and their representation by the Maoists as well as the state military brings new insights into women's agency through the embodiment of militancy and militarism. Yet, the "call to arms" for women in Nepal raises important questions for the feminist politics of representation vis a vis other movements around the globe for peace and social justice. Taking a feminist interdisciplinary perspective, the dissertation explores the ways in which the bio-politics of body, gender, and sexuality are enmeshed with nationalism, ideology and economics and work in the production of the "military woman" and the "revolutionary woman" in contemporary times of transnationalism and globalization.

• Job Placement: Paul W. Frenzel Professor and Chair, Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies, University of Minnesota
• Webpage: https://apps.cla.umn.edu/directory/profiles/isoke001
• Committee: M. Hawkesworth, S. Carroll, J. Regulska, J. Junn
• Dissertation: The Political Spaces of Black Women in the City: Identity, Agency and the Flow of Social Capital in Newark, NJ

Bio

Zenzele received a B.A. in Political Science from Clark Atlanta University and an M.A. in Political Science from University of Michigan – Ann Arbor. She is the first student to complete a PhD in Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers, and upon completion in 2007 she accepted a tenure-track position at University of Minnesota. Zenzele is deeply committed to transformative research and teaching, to the development of sophisticated understanding of Black women’s social and political activism in national and transnational contexts, and to the quest for social justice in a globalizing world.

Abstract

This project explores U.S. Black women's participation in social networks that enable political mobilizations in Newark, NJ. These networks include religious and social clubs, service clubs, neighborhood associations, indigenous cultural organizations, women's ethnic organizations, labor unions and other types of voluntary organizations that facilitate the creation, flow, and utilization of social capital. These networks transcend allegiance to local, state or national centers of government and often pursue politics that seek to blur or defy well-defined scalar structures. Often they seek to connect politics to larger racialized national trends in political economy while seeking to make social and political change at the local level. Using an interpretivist approach to data collection and analysis, I explore the discursive strategies of politicization, including the positive actions that U.S. Black women take to create and maintain political spaces that can be used to pursue their political objectives in Newark, NJ. This research suggests that in cases when Black women's political agency contributes to Black cultural production, the political support and cultivation of social capital to support Black women's political agency can be expected to flourish. When Black women politically challenge hegemonic elements of Black cultural production--specifically when they have challenged singular, masculinist conceptions of both Blackness and community--the flow of social capital in support of that agency will be stifled, resulting in the lack of social transformation at the local level.