Boston College

Kristin M. Peterson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Boston College, teaching courses related to the intersections of media and religion. She earned her Ph.D. in Media Studies from the University of Colorado Boulder, where she was also a research fellow for the Center for Media, Religion and Culture. Her research focuses on religious expression in digital media, specifically examining how young people engage with online media sites, images, videos and creative projects as spaces to develop meaning and for feminist activism. She is the author of Unruly Souls: The Digital Activism of Muslim and Christian Feminists (Rutgers University Press, 2022), as well as articles and book chapters on Muslim Instagram influencers, the #ChurchToo and #MosqueMeToo movements, the digital mourning after the murder of three Muslim college students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, ḥijab tutorial videos on YouTube, the Ms. Marvel comic series, and the Mipsterz fashion video.

Brandeis University

Gowri Vijayakumar is an Assistant Professor of Sociology, Core Faculty in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Affiliated Faculty in South Asian Studies at Brandeis University. Her research and teaching use feminist, queer, and transnational lenses to illuminate the trajectories of social movements, the everyday life of the state, and the political economy of globalization. She is the author of At Risk: Indian Sexual Politics and the Global AIDS Crisis (Stanford University Press, 2021) and co-editor of Sociology of South Asia: Postcolonial Legacies, Global Imaginaries (Palgrave-MacMillan, forthcoming). She also worked with Akkai Padmashali to write her autobiography, A Small Step in a Long Journey (Zubaan, 2022). Her articles on the politics of pandemics, sex work, and gendered labor have appeared or are forthcoming in Social Problems, Gender & Society, Qualitative Sociology, World Development, Signs, and Contemporary South Asia.

Simmons University

Suzanne Leonard is Professor of Literature and Writing at Simmons University, Director of the Master's program in Gender and Cultural Studies, and co-coordinator of the interdisciplinary minor in Cinema and Media Studies. She is also the Chair of the board of Console-ing Passions, an organization devoted to the study of Television, Video, Audio, New Media, and Feminism.

Leonard is most interested in the intersections between feminism and popular culture, and her recently published work has examined topics including: public feminisms, chic noir, white feminism, wedding comedies, and The Real Housewives franchise. She is co-editor of the recently published anthology Imagining We in the Age of I: Romance and Social Bonding in Contemporary Culture​ (Routledge, 2021)​​​. She is also the author of Wife, Inc.: The Business of Marriage in the Twenty-First Century (NYU, 2018); Fatal Attraction (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009); and the co-editor of Fifty Hollywood Directors (Routledge, 2015).

Leonard has been featured in The Boston Globe, The Guardian, USA Today, and a variety of media outlets, including The Los Angeles Review of Books, NPR and the podcast Public Intellectual with Jessa Crispin.

UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS BOSTON

Andrés Fabián Henao Castro is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Before joining UMB, he held a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Academy of Global Humanities and Critical Theory at the University of Bologna/Duke University and was the Karl Lowenstein Fellow at Amherst College. His research deals with the relationship between ancient and contemporary political theory, via the prisms of decolonial theory, psychoanalysis, critical theory, settler colonial critique, and poststructuralism. He is the author of The Militant Intellect: Critical Theory’s Conceptual Personae (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022) and Antigone in the Americas: Democracy, Sexuality and Death In the Settler Colonial Present (SUNY Press, 2021). His research has also been published in Critical Philosophy of Race,Settler Colonial Studies, Theoria, Theory & Event, Representation, La Deleuziana, Theatre Survey, Contemporary Political Theory, and Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, among others.