The GCWS Board Of Representatives

The GCWS is governed by a dedicated Board of Representatives. Board members are selected by each participating institution. The Board of Representatives are responsible for course development and selection, community outreach, and the financial and GCWS staff governance. The Board is led by two co-chairs. This position changes annually; a new co-chair is elected by the Board each year and serves a two-year term.

Featured

Kristin M. Peterson

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.

Sandra McEvoy

Boston University

Sandra McEvoy is a Clinical Associate Professor of Political Science and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Boston University. McEvoy’s primary research interests include the dynamics of political change including women’s participation in political violence; and gender-focused strategies that incorporate perpetrators of political violence into long-term conflict resolution strategies. She has written extensively on the Northern Irish conflict including, the gendered motivations for women's participation in political violence and the impact that such participation has on notions of men and masculinity. McEvoy’s secondary area of interest explores the vulnerabilities of LGBT+ populations during conflict and natural disasters. Her current project is as coeditor of The Oxford Handbook on Global LGBT Politics (expected fall 2019). The Handbook is one of the earliest collections that uses sexuality as a critical lens through which to understand global politics.

Gowri Vijayakumar

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.

Vacant

Harvard University

Role is currently vacant

Caley Horan

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Caley Horan is an associate professor of history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research and teaching interests include the history of risk and uncertainty, business and capitalism, gender, sexuality, and feminist activism in the modern United States. She is the author of Insurance Era: Risk, Governance, and the Privatization of Security in Postwar America (Chicago, 2021), and is currently at work on a book project that traces the history of astrological practice and consumption in the US from the turn of the twentieth century to the present.

Nicole Aljoe

Northeastern University

Nicole N. Aljoe is Professor of English and Africana Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. She is co-Director of The Early Caribbean Digital Archive and Mapping Black London, and Director of the Early Black Boston Digital Almanac. Her research and teaching focuses on 18th and early 19th Century Black Atlantic and Caribbean literatures with specializations in slave narrative, early novels about race, and digital humanities. The author of Creole Testimonies: Slave Narratives from the British West Indies, 1709-1836 (Palgrave 2012) and co-editor of Journeys of the Slave Narrative in the Early Americas (UVA Press 2014) as well as A Literary History of the Early Anglophone Caribbean: Islands in the Stream (Palgrave/Springer 2018), her essays have appeared in African American Review, American Literary History, Anthurium, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, The Journal of Early American Literature, and Women’s Studies.

Suzanne Leonard

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.

Lily Mengesha

Tufts University

Lily Mengesha is the Fletcher Foundation Assistant Professor of Dramatic Literature in the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies at Tufts University. Her research and teaching live at the intersection of critical Indigenous studies, gender and sexuality studies and performance theory. Her current book project, Critical Dreaming: Performance and Decoloniality in the Americas, argues for dreaming as a central tool for perceptual transformation within a decolonial project, particularly in the works of Indigenous-centered and feminist artists throughout North and Central America. Her research seeks to illuminate how artists use their bodies as active agents for documenting legacies of dispossession as well as blueprints for healing and transformation. Her writing on this topic can be found in The Drama Review, Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Journal, and Canadian Theatre Review.

Dr. Mengesha's research has been supported by various awards, grants and fellowships including the New England Humanities Consortium, the Center for Humanities at Tufts, MIT School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, the American Society for Theatre Research, the Joukowsky Family Foundation, the Cogut Center for the Humanities, the Pembroke Center for the Research and Teaching of Women, the Social Science Research Council and Mellon Mays Foundation. She currently serves on the advisory board of Tufts’ Women Gender and Sexuality Studies program, as well as a member of the Executive Committee for the American Society of Theatre Research.

Andrés Fabián Henao Castro

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.

GCWS Staff

Featured

Melanie Robinson

Program Manager

Melanie Robinson is the Program Manager for the Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality. She manages the day to day operations of GCWS in collaboration with the Board of Directors. She oversees course development, the course logistics during each academic year, the creation and implementation of faculty and student events, social media and communications, and coordinates with the nine member institutions of GCWS.

Prior to joining the Consortium, Melanie worked with the MIT Internet Policy Research Initiative overseeing their administrative and operational affairs as well as events. Her career is rooted in student support and project management. Most notably, she was one of the early project managers and lead advisers for the PACE Program at UT Austin. Melanie is the treasurer and entertainment committee chair for Boston Pride for the People, and served as the entertainment co-chair for Boston Pop-Up Pride. She is also a founding member of New England Black Circus, training and performing in trapeze (static and dance) and aerial hoop. Melanie holds a BA in Women’s and Gender Studies from Simmons University.