^ top

Corie Hammers (Ph.D., University of Oklahoma; M.S., Portland State University) is Assistant Professor in the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department. She has had additional training in feminist theory and continental feminism at Utrecht University’s Netherlands Research School of Women’s Studies. In Summer 2007 she was a Visiting Scholar at the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC): Research Center for Law, Gender and Sexuality at the University of Keele.

Her main research project has been one of examining lesbian/queer public sexual cultures and sexual spaces in Canada and the US. She is particularly interested in interrogating the linkages between sexuality, space and identity formations, and the sexual politics within nonnormative sexual communities. She is using insights stemming from her ethnographic investigations of these lesbian/queer sexual spaces to examine the intersections of feminist and queer theory. She continues to do research on lesbian/queer sexual spaces. She has just begun a new project exploring the politics of (non)belonging among African American women within the LGBT community and their networking practices.

She has published essays in a variety of journals such as Sexualities, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Journal of Gender Studies and Journal of
Homosexuality. She is currently working on a number of manuscripts. One article entitled “Queer Exclusions and Corporeal Silences: The Promises and Limitations of Queer in Public Sexual Spaces,” for Transgender Identities: Towards a Social Analysis of Gender Diversity (Routledge), an anthology on transgender issues and identities, explores the exclusionary mechanisms and transphobia that operate in “queer” sexual spaces. “ ‘But I Love Men’: The ‘F-Word’ and the (De)Stabilization of the Hetero/Homo Binary”, which is currently in the revise-and-resubmit stage for Gender & Society, examines through qualitative techniques, women’s disavowal of feminism and its linkages with
heteronormativity. Utilizing data and the theoretical insights emerging from my
ethnographic work on queer sexual spaces, an article entitled “The Transparent White Subject and the Racial (Re)Production of Sexed Spaces,” will explore the intersections and tensions between queer theory and critical race theory.
Her teaching interests include feminist theory, queer theory, sociological theory, gender and globalization, the sociology of gender and sexuality, sociology of sport and the politics of food. Her core courses in the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Department include Race, Sex and Work in the Global Economy, Feminist/Queer Theories and Methodologies and Sexuality, Race and Nation: Introduction to LGBT Studies. E-mail: chammers@macalester.edu

^ top

 

Paige Sweet is a Visiting Instructor in the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department. She is a doctoral candidate at the University of Minnesota where she is finishing a dissertation in Comparative Literature. She also has a MA from NYU in Humanities and Social Thought and a BA from UC Santa Cruz in Women’s Studies. Her research examines literary experiments with punctuation and themes of forgetting in late nineteenth and twentieth century French, Brazilian, and American film, literature, and poetry. Her interests include theories and histories of typography, punctuation, and language; memory and forgetting; critical theory and cultural studies; gender, feminist, and queer theory; aesthetics and politics. She has taught classes in literature, cultural studies, the politics of sex, and women's and feminist literature. She has published articles on forgetting in Clarice Lispector's The Passion According to G.H. as well as Piracy and Plagiarism in the work of Kathy Acker (forthcoming). E-mail: psweet@macalester.edu

^ top

 

 

Affiliated WGSS Faculty include. . .

Devavani Chatterjea, is Assistant Professor of Biology in the field of Immunology. Her research areas include development of hematopoietic cells, and bone marrow stromal signalling. E-mail: chatterjea@macalester.edu

 

Adrienne Christiansen, Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for Scholarship and Teaching. She specializes in communications via computer, war talk, feminism and the rhetoric of social movements. Most recently, she has been drawn to visual persuasion, particularly as manifested in editorial cartoons (of former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura ) and in political monuments in Cyprus. Christiansen has also studied and written about contemporary conservatism, AIDS activists and the Persian Gulf War. For example, she presented a paper on Race Traitors in Search of Credibility: Revisiting Aristotles Ethos with Ward Connerly, Linda Chavez and J.C. Watts. Christiansen teaches classes in American political communication: Rhetoric of Campaigns and Elections, Presidential Rhetoric, Womens Voices in Public Discourse, Rhetoric and Social Change, Digital Politics, Theories of Rhetoric, American Public Address, Freedom of Speech in a Mass Media Society, and The Politics of Public Space. E-mail: christiansen@macalester.edu

Beth Cleary, Associate Professor of Theater and Dance. Areas of special interest and training: American theater; political theater; plays by women, feminist theater; theater by, for and about communities of color; postmodern performance theory; Brecht; puppetry, history and practice; directing history; playwrighting; yoga and somatic inquiry. E-mail: cleary@macalester.edu

Paula Cooey, Margaret Weyerhaeuser Harmon Professor of Religion at Macalester College.  A graduate of Harvard University (PhD), Harvard Divinity School (MTS), and the University of Georgia (BA), she teaches courses in the history of Christian traditions, Christianity and Culture, and theory of religion.  These courses include “Jesus, Dissent, & Desire,” “Love & Death,” “Work & Ethics across Traditions”, “The Sacred & the Sword,” Dissent, Reform, & Expansion in the Sixteenth Century,” “Contemporary Christian Thought,” and “Approaches to the Study of Religion.” She has written several books and articles; her latest book Willing the Good: Jesus, Dissent, & Desire, published by Augsburg Fortress Press, was released summer, 2006.  Appointed to the Macalester faculty in 1999, she currently focuses her research on what it means to understand religion by examining religious life and practice in contexts of conflict, disruption, and assimilation, comparatively with other religious traditions and with secularism; her major project on this subject is tentatively titled Getting Religion. Please see a list of Professor Cooey's publications in the Faculty Publication Database. E-mail: cooey@macalester.edu

Erik Davis, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies. Davis studies and teaches about Buddhism, Asian religions, and the theory of religion. He is particularly interested in funerals, ritual, and the connection between agriculture and religious imagination. He is finishing his dissertation at the University of Chicago, titled, "Treasures of the Buddha: imagining death and life in contemporary Cambodia." His interest in sex and gender largely revolves around both a general interest in human hierarchy, and specifically in the use of ritual to transfer physical powers of fecundity to men in social and ritual contexts. Erik is a Macalester Alumnus ('96), when he completed a core concentration in what has become today's Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. He received his masters degree at the University of Washington in Seattle (2006). He lived in Cambodia from 2003-2006. E-mail: davise@macalester.edu

Julie Dolan, Associate Professor of Political Science. An expert on American politics, Dolan’s research focuses on inter-governmental relations and policy making. She has published numerous articles and papers on the federal bureaucracy and on women and politics. She is the co-author of a series of American politics’ textbooks entitled Government in Action, each requiring students to role-play as various actors in American politics. E-mail: dolan@macalester.edu

Paul Dosh, Assistant Professor of Political Science. An expert on Latin American politics and social movements, he is the author of Demanding the Land: Urban Popular Movements in Peru and Ecuador, 1990-2005 (Penn State University Press).  His articles appear in Latin American Perspectives, Latin American Politics & Society, the Journal of Latin American Studies, the NACLA Report on the Americas, and the Political Science Educator. His Latin America through Women’s Eyes course has been influenced by his research on women's leadership of popular movements in Bolivia and Ecuador. E-mail: dolan@macalester.edu

Susanna Drake, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies. Drake’s scholarly interests focus on religions in antiquity, early Jewish-Christian relations, and constructions of gender and sexuality in the ancient world and today.  She completed her dissertation on early Christian representations of Jewish sexuality, and teaches introductory courses on the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible, and seminars on Christian Identity and the Rise of Anti-Judaism, and the construction of orthodoxy and heresy in early Christianity.  She currently offers the WGSS crosslisted course Christianity in Late Antiquity. In the future, she plans to offer additional courses on women, gender, and sexuality in early Judaism and Christianity. E-mail: sdrake@macalester.edu

Daniel Gilbert, Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies, is a cultural historian of the modern United States with special interests in transnational mass culture, labor and working-class history, cities and urban space, and social movements.  He received his B.A. in music from Wesleyan University in 1998, and his Ph.D. in American studies from Yale University in 2008.   His essays and reviews have appeared in the Massachusetts Historical Review, the Labor Studies Journal, and the Journal of Sport History.  His current book project, Expanding the Strike Zone: Baseball in the Age of Free Agency, examines the political economy and cultural meaning of baseball in the second half of the twentieth century. E-mail: dgilber1@macalester.edu

Ruthann Godollei, Professor of Art, teaches Printmaking, Design, and Art Theory. Professor Godollei has shown art work across the country, incorporating political and social commentary in pieces with ironic humor from a feminist perspective. Godollei's work is in collections such as the Belgian Royal Museum of Fine Art, the Croatian National University in Rijek, Rutgers University, and the Weisman Art Museum. Her pieces were also featured on a tour with work from the Frans Masereel Print Center in Belgium. E-mail: godollei@macalester.edu

Gitta Hammarberg, DeWitt Wallace Professor in German Studies & Russian. She is an expert in 18th and 19th century Russian literature and in recent Slavic literary theory. She has published a book on Russian Sentimentalism, From the Idyll to the Novel: Karamzin's Sentimentalist Prose (Cambridge University Press, 1991) and numerous articles on minor literary genres and gender in late 18th century literature. She is currently researching Russian spa culture. E-mail: hammarberg@macalester.edu

Duchess Harris, Associate Professor in American Studies. She is an interdisciplinary scholar trained in American Studies. Her general area of interest is Twentieth Century African American political history. She received her B.A. in American History and Afro-American Studies with an English minor from the University of Pennsylvania in 1991 and her Ph.D. in American Studies with a minor at the Center for Advanced Feminist Studies from the University of Minnesota in 1997. She has conducted research for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and was a Constituent Advocate for the late U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone. Harris was a recipient of the Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship during the 2001-02 academic year. She joined the faculty in 1998. E-mail: harris@macalester.edu

Lynn Hudson, Associate Professor of History. She teaches courses on slavery and abolition in the U.S., western history, social movements, and the history of gender and sexuality. She is a specialist in African American history and has been active in women's studies and ethnic studies programs. Her publications examine the lives of free black men and women during the age of slavery, and the possibilities for freedom in the U.S. West. Her recent research investigates the legal, cultural, and social manifestations of Jim Crow discrimination in California in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. E-mail: hudson@macalester.edu

Joanna Inglot, Associate Professor of Art History. She completed her PhD in art history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with an expertise in Modern and Contemporary Art. She has been writing and lecturing extensively on the subject of contemporary art in Europe and the United States. Her book The Figurative Sculpture of Magdalena Abakanowicz: Bodies, Environments, and Myths, published by the University of California Press at Berkeley in 2004, examines the work of this pioneering fiber artist and sculptor in the context of a dynamic cultural and socio-political scene that developed under Communism in Poland and in the international context. Her second book, WARM: Feminist Art Movement in Minnesota, 1970s-1990s (Minneapolis: Frederick R. Weisman and University of Minnesota Press, 2007), which appeared in conjunction with the exhibition on the subject that she curated at the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis, analyzes the Women's Art Registry of Minnesota (WARM) as a leading feminist art collective in the United States and is the first scholarly attempt to situate WARM in a larger feminist context. Dr. Inglot teaches courses in the area of modern and contemporary art, including 20th Century Art: Modernisms and Postmodernisms; Contemporary Art and Critical Theory; Race, Ethnicity, Class and Gender in American Art; Gender, Sexualities & Feminist Visual Culture, and Introduction to Art History II: from Renaissance to Modern. E-mail: inglot@macalester.edu

Liz Jansen, Visiting Assistant Professor of Biology. She is a neuroscientist with expertise in the areas of neural transplantation, neural regeneration and plasticity, and neuroprotective drug therapies. She has employed behavioral, neurochemical and molecular biological techniques in her research on ischemic stroke. She teaches courses in Women, Health and Reproduction, Neuropharmacology and Neuroanatomy. E-mail: jansen@macalester.edu

Zornitsa Keremidchieva, Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science, researches feminist rhetorical theory and history, especially in the intersection between women’s status and immigration politics in the United States. Her primary object of study is the U.S. Congress, particularly the ways in which gender has historically played a role in framing approaches to policy on various subjects—from U.S. foreign policy to domestic welfare policy. Additionally, she is researching the role of speech education for men and women in the Americanization campaigns of the 1920s. E-mail: zkeremid@macalester.edu

Mahnaz Kousha, Professor of Sociology. She is a sociologist specializing in the intersection of gender, race, class and nationality. She has researched the changing status and image of women in Iran and the Middle East. She is the author of Nothing Can Stop This Tide: Iranian Women Speak and Voices from Iran: The Changing Lives of Iranian Women. She has also published articles on life satisfaction and happiness among Iranians. In addition, she has researched labor relations between African American household workers and their white female employers during the first half of the 20th century. Kousha has served on the board of directors of Critique: Journal for Critical Studies of the Middle East. E-mail: kousha@macalester.edu

Ruthanne Kurth-Schai, Professor and Chair of Educational Studies. She specializes in educational reform and philosophy. Her research interests include philosophic and policy analyses centered on the role of public education in addressing social justice, environmental and spiritual issues as well as a multinational study on education for democracy. She is also interested in ways to change the images, roles and conditions of young people. She teaches courses on social, philosophical and political issues in education. E-mail: kurthschai@macalester.edu

Teresa Mesa Adamuz, Visiting Instructor of Hispanic and Latin American studies. E-mail: mesat@macalester.edu

Karine Moe, Assistant Professor of Economics, investigates the role women play in economic development. She teaches Economics of Gender, a course that uses both neo-classical and feminist economic theory to explore how gender differences lead to different economic outcomes for women and men, both within families and in the marketplace. E-mail: moe@macalester.edu

Lara Nielsen, Assistant Professor of Theater and Dance. She specializes in critiques of subjectivity, movement, and the state; globalization and cultural studies; contra-area studies Americas; gender and feminist criticism; orality, ethnography, and multimedia documentary methodologies. She holds an M.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Minnesota, with a minor in Feminist and Gender Studies, and a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University. E-mail: lnielsen@macalester.edu

Joan Ostrove, Associate Professor of Psychology, held the position of Chair of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from 2006-2008. She completed her B.A. at Williams College, her Ph.D. in personality psychology and a certificate in women’s studies at the University of Michigan, and a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco. Her work focuses on the connections between psychology and social structure, and she has published in the areas of social class background and the college experience, social class and health, interpersonal implications of the social representation of disability, and women’s midlife personality development. She teaches a senior seminar that is cross-listed with WGS called Lives in Context: Psychology and Social Structure. She also teaches personality psychology, history and systems of psychology, health psychology, directed research, and introductory psychology. E-mail: ostrove@macalester.edu

Roopali Phadke, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Policy & Politics. Her research and teaching is at the nexus of environmental studies, international development and science and technology studies.   Her interests lie in the democratization of science and technology decision-making and the hybridization of technical expertise and local knowledge.   Her current research focuses on private and public development of water resources.  In addition to her water related work, she is developing new projects in the fields of wind energy and desalination. E-mail: phadke@macalester.edu

Peter Rachleff, Professor of History. He specializes in U.S. labor history (although he will be offering a new course comparing the U.S. and South African freedom movements in the spring of 2005). He is interested in the roles played by race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality in the making and re-making of the U.S. working-class. His course "Women and Work in U.S. History"; is his only cross-listed contribution to WGS, but students in all of his classes will find some serious engagement with gender both in historical content and the application of analytical theories. Peter is currently researching and analyzing the work of the Jubilee Singers of the Buffalo Historical Marionettes, a troupe of five African American men and three African American women who performed historically-inflected puppet shows in Buffalo, New York, in the 1930s. E-mail: rachleff@macalester.edu

Khaldoun Samman, Associate Professor of Sociology. He specializes in world historical/comparative sociology, urban sociology, globalization, the sociology of religion and classical and modern sociological theory. His can talk about religion and classical and modern sociological theory and sacred space and nationalism in comparative perspective, particularly as it pertains to Rome (Italy), Mecca (Saudi Arabia) and Jerusalem (Israel). E-mail: samman@macalester.edu

Christopher Scott, Assistant Professor of Asian Languages and Cultures. He is a Japanese literature and film specialist. His research interests are fundamentally interdisciplinary, bridging the fields of race, gender, and postcolonial studies, and highlighting both Japan?s place in Asia and Asia?s place in Japan. His dissertation, entitled "Invisible Men: The Zainichi Korean Presence in Postwar Japanese Culture," explores the representation of Korean residents of Japan (so-called zainichi Koreans) in postwar Japanese literature, film, and popular culture. More generally, he is interested in the intersections of race, gender, class, and nationality in postwar Japanese culture. During the 2006-07 academic year, Scott will teach two sections of Elementary Japanese I, The Fiction of Modern Japan (a modern Japanese literature course) and Translating Japanese: Theory and Practice. E-mail: scottcd@macalester.edu

Beth Severy-Hoven, Associate Professor and Chair of Classics. Severy-Hoven is a specialist on Rome in the Age of Augustus. She has taught at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome, a study abroad program for American undergraduates run by an intercollegiate consortium, and is the director of the Classics Departments January in Rome Program. She has taught both the history of Greece and Rome, Greek and Latin languages for the department, Women in Antiquity, Art and Archaeology of the Greco-Roman World and Greek Myths from Troy to Hollywood. Severy-Hovens scholarly work includes a number of articles and her recent publication Augustus and the Family at the Birth of the Roman Empire, London: Routledge Press, 2003. E-mail: severy@macalester.edu

Dianna Shandy, assistant professor of anthropology, teaches courses on refugee migration and transnationalism, Africa, social science research methodology, and cultural anthropology. Her most recent research focuses on the resettlement of Nuer-speaking southern Sudanese refugees in the United States. Other work includes applied anthropological studies in the human services and health spheres. E-mail: shandy@macalester.edu

Clay Steinman, formerly of Communication and Media Studies and beginning in Fall 2004 professor of Humanities & Media & Cultural Studies, teaches about film/media/gender/race/culture/power. For Women's and Gender Studies, he teaches Feminism/Representation/Film. He co-authored Consuming Environments: Television and Commercial Culture (Rutgers, 1999) and wrote about gender and "the popular"; for The Dictionary of Film and Television Theory (Routledge, 2001) and about male viewer sexualities for Men, Masculinity, and the Media (Sage, 1992). His most recent work, "Beyond Eurocentrism: The Frankfurt School and Whiteness Theory," will appear in Globalizing Critical Theory (Rowman and Littlefield, 2004). E-mail: steinman@macalester.edu

Jaine Strauss, Professor of Psychology. She is a clinincal psychologist, and an expert on gender and mental health. Her research focuses on body image, eating disorders, mood and conceptions of self. Her study on the effect watching diet TV commercials has on dieters was published nationally. She recently wrote an article on the effects of the stimulant Ritalin on children with attention deficit disorder and oppositionality disorder for the American Psychological Association?s Journal of Abnormal Psychology. Strauss is interested in feminst approaches to clinical psychology. She teaches courses on personality, behavior disorders, community psychology, clinical and counseling psychology and gender and mental health. She received the Minnesota Psychological Association Walter D.Mink Award for outstanding teaching in undergraduate psychology in 1999 and Macalester's Excellence in Teaching Award in 2001. E-mail: strauss@macalester.edu

Jöelle Vitiello, associate professor and chair of French and Francophone Studies, teaches all levels of the French language and 20th century French and Francophone literature and culture. She has researched and published on contemporary French, French-writing Caribbean and Lebanese women writers. She is studying representations of friendship in contemporary French literature written by women. E-mail: vitiello@macalester.edu

Wendy Weber, Visiting Instructor of Political Science. Her primary field is International Relations and her research interests include gender and global politics, international political theory, security studies and critical geopolitics. Her broader research agenda focuses on changing patterns of governance in the contemporary era, especially in the areas of international law and human rights. Weber has been the faculty advisor to the Amnesty International organization on campus and volunteers at the Center for Victims of Torture in Minneapolis. E-mail: weberw@macalester.edu

Christine Willcox, Associate Professor of Art. She has had exhibitions in public art spaces and commercial galleries in both Canada and the United States. She has exhibited her paintings at the Soo Visual Art Center in Minneapolis in a show titled, "Abjectify." Her painted murals can be seen in venues such as the Toronto Zoo, and restaurants and businesses in Toronto, Winnipeg, Atlanta, Illinois and Georgia. She teaches courses and specializes in painting and drawing. Willcox is also interested in creating work that merges natural science and art. E-mail: willcox@macalester.edu

Xin Yang, Assistant Professor of Chinese. She received her Ph.D. in Chinese literature from the University of Oregon in 2006 and her B.A. in Teaching Chinese as a Second Language from Beijing Foreign Studies University. She teaches Chinese language and literature, specializing in contemporary literature and culture. Her academic research focuses on the study of Chinese female writers and writing in a post-feminism environment marked by neo-liberalism and ever-increasing consumerism in the global context. Publication:“Digitized Parody: The Politics of Egao in Contemporary China,” co-authored with Haomin Gong, China Information, forthcoming; “Cyber Writing as Urban Fashion: the Case of Anni Baobei,” in Southeast Review of Asian Studies, Vol. XXVIII, 2006, 121-129. E-mail: xyang@macalester.edu

 

^ top