People

PhD Alumni Listing

PhD Alumni Listing

PhD Alumni Listing

Reed, Erica

  • Research Interests: Motherhood Studies; Maternal Grief
  • Education: M.A. from Rutgers in 2016

Bio

Erica Reed is a Program Coordinator at the Dean’s Office for the School of Graduate Studies, and part-time lecturer in the WGSS department. Her research focus is motherhood studies, with an emphasis on maternal grief. She received her M.A. from Rutgers in 2016 and looks forward to continuing her research as a Ph.D. candidate.

Fatima, Rawshan E.


Bio

Rawshan E. Fatima has completed her Bachelors and Masters in Women and Gender Studies at University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. She is a first year Ph.D. student at Women's and Gender Studies department, Rutgers University. She has a background in feminist activism in the global South as well as an extensive research experience with local NGOs, INGOs, and Govt. agencies.  Her research interest includes political economy of labor, biopower, transnational feminist politics, critical development studies, globalization, and NGOization.

Fellowships/Grants/Awards

School of Graduate Studies (SGS) Excellence Fellowship

Sherman, Zandi

  • Research Interests: Negotiations of identity and belonging in the queer African diaspora
  • Education: M.A., Global Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Freiburg University and the University of Cape Town Undergraduate and Honours Degrees, University of Cape Town, African Gender Institute
  • Job Placement: Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, CUNY

Bio

Zandi Sherman is an African feminist activist who devotes most of her energy to collectively imagining new ways of building queer African community. She has been involved in struggles for racial, gender and economic justice in both Johannesburg and Cape Town. She has also worked as a researcher for organizations working in popular education and queer media making and documentation. 

Pivazyan, Arev

  • Research Interests: Nation building, citizenship and identity, human rights discourses, queer theory, transgender studies, the Caucasus and the Eastern Mediterranean.
  • Education: M.A., Performance Studies, New York University

Bio

Arev's research focuses on discourses of the modern nation-state, anxieties around racial and geographic belonging, land claims, and the deployment of human rights rhetoric in the Caucasus and Eastern Mediterranean. Arev earned an M.A. in Performance Studies at NYU, completing a thesis on transgender visual and performance art, mourning, and the progressive logic of neoliberal identity formation. Arev is also a founding member of the Hye-Phen Collective, a transnational, queer and feminist, diasporan Armenian media collective and e-zine.

Aziz, Amir Mohamed

  • Research Interests: Critical carceral studies; Disability studies; Gender and Islam; Critical race/ethnic studies; Immigration; Algeria, northern Africa, France; Poetry and resistance.
  • Education: M.A. French Studies, University of Texas at Austin

Bio

Amir Mohamed Aziz is a writer and scholar of critical race/ethnicity and disability studies, gender studies, critical carceral studies, and immigration. Amir’s research focuses on U.S., northern African, Algerian, French, and Muslim contexts at the intersections of gender, ability, race/ethnicity, religion, and migration.

One of Amir’s projects examines how so-called ‘counterterrorism’ and ‘War on Terror’ policies of detention, incarceration, surveillance, and policing have impacted the lives of (im)migrant women, Muslims, and gender non-normative communities of color in the United States.

Amir is also a member of the Middle East Studies Graduate Forum and the Center for African Studies, and teaches courses such as Prison Abolition and Gender, Culture, Representation.

Selected Publications

“On Islamophobia, Anti-Terrorism Securitization, and Secularism in France.” Jadaliyya. March 15, 2021, https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/42484/On-Islamophobia,-Anti-Terrorism-Securitization,-and-Secularism-in-France.

“The South of Algeria has something to say.” Africa Is a Country. July 30, 2019. https://africasacountry.com/2019/07/the-south-has-something-to-say.

“Protesting Politics in Algeria.” Middle East Report Online. March 26, 2019. https://merip.org/2019/03/protesting-politics-in-algeria/.

“Rewriting Algeria: Transcultural Kinship and Anticolonial Revolution in Kateb Yacine’s L’homme aux sandales de caoutchouc.” In Art, Creativity, and Politics in Africa and the Diaspora, ed. Abimbola Adelakun and Toyin Falola. 2018. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Fellowships/Grants/Awards

  • Center for African Studies Graduate Student Enhancement Grant, Rutgers, State University of New Jersey, 2019
  • Summer Fieldwork Grant for Research on Human Rights and Economic Inequality, Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, 2016-2017

Valentin, Al

  • Research Interests: feminist media; media literacy; animated cartoons and video games; gender identity, sexual orientation, race, class, size and ability in popular culture.
  • Education: B.A., Women's and Gender Studies, Political Science, LGBTQ Studies, 2013

Bio

Alessa Valentin is a recent Brooklyn College graduate who majored in Women’s and Gender Studies and double minored in Political Science and LGBTQ Studies. Their senior project focused on the popular Cartoon Network show, Adventure Time, and how its non-normative depictions of various gender expressions and identities can help to socialize children into healthier, less oppressive concepts of gender that move past the model of binary biological sex and towards a more inclusive model of socialized gender identity. Their research interests include how pop culture helps simultaneously reflect and shape the way that we talk about and experience gender identity, sexual orientation, race, class, size and ability with a specific emphasis on animated cartoons and video games. As an independent scholar, Alessa has given talks at various institutions on feminism and media. Alessa hopes to become a professor and possibly start their own media literacy non-profit that will engage with people outside of academia with the hopes of affecting larger change.

Haziz-Ginsberg, A.

  • Research Interests: Queer and Trans studies; Biopolitics and Critical Security Studies; British Empire and Surveillance; Crisis and Theories of Emergency
  • Education: B.A., Religion, Hunter College, 2010 MTS, Harvard Divinity School, 2012
  • Job Placement: Lecturer in the Department of Interdisciplinary Humanities at King's College London
  • Committee: Jasbir Puar, Chair, Carlos Decena, Maya Mikdashi, Rahul Rao, Professor of International Political Thought, University of St. Andrews, Scotland
  • Dissertation: Technologies of the Quotidian: British Empire, Race, and the Biopolitics of Security

Gray, Katherine

  • Research Interests: Film studies, queer theory, transnational theory.
  • Education: M.A., Film Studies, Columbia University B.A., Film Studies, Smith College

Bio

After graduating from Smith College, Katy Gray worked for Orchard Films, a non-fiction production company in New York doing research for historical documentaries. She later joined the staff of NewFest: The New York LGBT Film Festival, where she was the Festival Assistant and Outreach Coordinator. After completing her master’s degree, Katy worked as a research assistant and project manager for Columbia University's Women Film Pioneers Project, a global initiative historicizing the lives of women working in silent era film industries. Katy's master’s work in film studies focused on American rape-revenge narratives. Her thesis proposed three types of rape-revenge narratives situated within a discussion of the relationship between virtual technologies and the production of physical evidence. More broadly, Katy is interested in the articulation of identity in cinema, notions of reality, feminist pedagogy, and the history of stuntwomen.

Salazar, Jillian

  • PhD
  • Research Interests: Sexualities, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Chicana Feminist Thought, Queer of Color Critique
  • Education: 2017, MA, Sexuality Studies, San Francisco State University 2011, BA, Politics/Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz
  • Committee: Sylvia Chan-Malik (co-chair), Deborah Vargas (co-chair), Carlos Decena (internal member), Kyla Schuller (internal member), Wendy Cheng (outside member)
  • Dissertation: "Queer Modes of Survival: A Cultural Analysis of Responses to Gender, Sexual, and Racial Marginalization in California’s Central Valley"

 

  

 

 

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