Women’s Studies Department Affiliate Faculty

Elisa Abes, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Psychological and Social Foundations
Specialization: Identity Development of non-heterosexual women college students including relationship among sexual orientation identity and other dimensions of identity; queer theory

Pratyusha Basu, Ph.D., Visiting Instructor, Department of Geography
Specialization: women’s critical roles in reproducing rural society; feminist theory and development and environmental movements; and how multiple oppressions are created and sustained; gendered norms and space; postcolonial theory, feminist ethnography and feminist film theory

Elizabeth Bell, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Department of Communication
Specialization: Performance Studies, Feminist Theory, Feminist Pedagogy

Art Bochner, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Communication
Specialization: narratives and ethnography with emphases on feminism and elderly women

Elizabeth Bird, Ph.D., Chair, Anthropology Department
Specialization: media studies, with a special emphasis on gendered readings of media text; media presentations of gender and race; digital divide issues related to gender

Sara Deats, Ph.D., Distinguished University Professor, Department of English
Specialization: Renaissance drama; Shakespeare; feminist criticism

Carolyn Ellis, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Communication
Specialization: Autoethnographic approaches to doing research narrative writing, and issues of illness and loss

Maria Esformes, Ph.D., Associate Professor, World Languages Education
Specialization: Research on contemporary women writers of Hispanic background

Kennan Ferguson, Ph.D., Director, Interdisciplinary Social Sciences
Specialization: political implications of silence; political philosophy including feminist theory, love

Silvia Ruffo Fiore, (retired) Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature and Jerome Krivanek Distinguished Teacher
Specialization: Classical, medieval, and early modern comparative literature; interdisciplinary literary studies; women writers; classical and early modern humanistic and pedagogical philosophy

Laurel Graham, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Sociology
Specialization: Gender and consumption, with attention to ethnicity, age and race

Cheryl Hall, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Government and International Affairs
Specialization: Importance of Passion to feminist and other forms of political activism

Elizabeth Hirsch, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of English,
Specialization: Modern and postmodernism; feminist studies; biography and life writing

Nicole Johnson, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Political Science
Specialization: the conditional effects of racial cues in candidate evaluations and the costs of mobilizing around health issues for black women. The African American Institute at Howard University called on Johnson to conduct a series of lectures on “Checks and Balances and Separation of Powers: Our United States Government” for women parliamentarians from Senegal and for municipal councilors from Tunisia.

Danny Jorgensen, Ph.D., Professor and Chair, Religious Studies
Specialization: Women in New Religions, especially the Latter-day Saint (Mormon) religions

Rebecca Kukla is Professor of Philosophy and Internal Medicine at the University of South Florida.  She received an Honours B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Toronto in 1990, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy in 1996 from the University of Pittsburgh, where she also took graduate courses in Cultural Studies and Women's Studies.  From 2003-2005, she was a Greenwall Fellow in Bioethics and Health Policy at the Phoebe R. Berman Bioethics Center of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.  She is the author of numerous books and articles including Mass Hysteria: Medicine, Culture, and Mothers' Bodies, and she recently guest-edited a special issue of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy entitled "Maternal Bodies".  Her current research is supported by a $100,000 grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada entitled "Autonomy and the Negotiation of Information in Reproductive Health Care".

John McKiernan-Gonzalez, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, History
Specialization: communicable disease, shaping and making racial boundaries, and practices of writing history, all with emphasis on Latina and Latino experience

Maralee Mayberry, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Sociology
Specialization: Feminist pedagogy and feminist science studies

Karen Perrin, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Community and Family Health, College of Public Health
Specialization: health communication that empowers women, especially low-literarcy and low-income populations

Cheryl Rodriguez, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Africana Studies
Specialization: Low-Income Women and Housing; Women’s Community Activism; Critical Analysis of Sex Education Strategies; and Black Women’s Studies

Laura Runge Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of English
Specialization: Restoration and 18th century literature; women writers; feminist theory

Barbara Shircliffe, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Psychological and Social Foundations, College of Eduction
Specialization: gender in the educational process

Beverly Ward, Ph.D. Director, Ethnography and Transport Systems, Center for Urban
Transportation Research
Specialization: Public Transportation Policy and Poor Women's Travel Issues

Nancy White, Ph.D., Professor, Anthropology
Specialization: History of Women in Archaeology and Science in General

Naomi Yavneh, Ph.D., Associate Professor Humanities and American Studies
Specialization: Sex and Gender in Renaissance Italy