Erin Ackerman
Government
Room 3257A N
eackerman@jjay.cuny.edu
(646) 557-4614
I recently joined the faculty at John Jay College after completing my PhD in Political Science at The Johns Hopkins University. My research and teaching interests relate to issues of women and law, particularly as concern reproduction. I am currently revising my dissertation, which concerns the regulation of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) in the United States. I have published entries in the Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States on sexual orientation and freedom of association court cases. I regularly teach GOV 319: Gender and Law.
Valerie Allen
English
Room 1295 N
vallen@jjay.cuny.edu
(212) 237-8594
I am a professor in the English dept, and I joined John Jay in 1999, having previously taught in Florida and before that in Scotland. I work in medieval studies and continental philosophy, and have published a number of pieces on women and medieval thought. My current gender project is an essay for Journal of the History of Sexuality on the non-correspondence between modern, English (language) and medieval, Latin (language) categories of gender and of straight/queer identity.
Andrea Balis
History/ Interdisciplinary Studies
Room 432.15 T
abalis@jjay.cuny.edu
(212) 237-8132
I was drawn to the committee because of teaching interests (wanting to gain more experience in using readings and pedagogy), research, and personal politics and long held convictions.
Rosemary Barberet
Sociology Department
Room 520.10
rbarberet@jjay.cuny.edu
(212) 237-8676
I am new to John Jay as of September, 2005. Most of my career has been at universities in Spain, where with colleagues I conducted Spain's first national violence against women survey and also researched women prisoners and prostitution. I am still engaged in research in Spain on domestic violence policy. Here at John Jay, I teach Gender and International Criminal Justice (Sociology 333). I chaired the American Society of Criminology's International Division for four years and thus enjoy researching and teaching the intersection of international issues with gender.
Teresa Booker
African-American StudiesDepartment
Room
tbooker@jjay.cuny.edu
(212) 237-8090
My dissertation focused on the delivery of humanitarian relief during civil war. My research interests include U.N. peacemaking and African restorative justice practices.
Gloria Browne-Marshall
Law, Police Science and Criminal Justice Administration
422 T
GBMarshall@jjay.cuny.edu
(212) 237-8407
The focus of my gender studies research and published work has included HIV/AIDS and Black female inmates, statutory rape policies and laws, international comparative justice issues. I also write essays and stageplays from a Black womanist perspective. My general research involves the protection of vulnerable groups under Constitutional law and International Public law. I utilize present legal systems as well as past systems of justice to reveal the evolution of rights and restrictions under law.
Erica Burleigh
English Department
Room
eburleigh@jjay.cuny.edu
(212) 237-8798
My interest in gender and sexuality is longstanding (pretty much from the time I realized I made a more convincing Axl Rose than Axl Rose himself). My teaching and research reveals this engagement, from an undergraduate thesis on cultural representations of rape in the American 1950s to courses on Anglo-American women's writing, gendered eighteenth-century conceptions of virtue and vice, and "Working Girls," a course exploring women's relationship to labor in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My dissertation explores gender in British and American literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, focusing on gossip and gender ventriloquism in the periodical essay and on incest, miscegenation, and equity in early
American novels.
Bettina Messias Carbonell
English
1293N
bcarbonell@jjay.cuny.edu
In my teaching and research I focus on American literature, cultural
activism (the struggle for rights and justice through literature and
other arts), and the representation of difficult history in museums. I
am currently working on a series of articles on ethical inquiry in
twentieth-century American narratives.
Effie Papatzikou Cochran
English
1289N,
EfthymiaC@aol.com
212-237-8592
I have been a regular and faithful member of the WSC committee which I also Chaired when we had Gish Jen for our Literary Lecturer. During my time as Chair, I gave the first and only "Rosa Parks Award" to the now retired Ms. Hilda Jones.
My dissertation was on linguistic/grammatical sexism and the "pseudogeneric" he/man. I also co-edited a book on Isssues in Gender, Language Learning, and Classroom Pedagogy , and have written an article on gender neutral language in the ESL classroom. Finally, I coined the term "Medusa Syndrome", referring to the petrifying gynaekophobia that males experience facing potentially status quo threatening women at the workplace and even at home.
Shuki Cohen
Psychology
2402N
shcohen@jjay.cuny.edu
(646) 557-4627
My main interests are in experimental psychopathology, and I am looking at gender differences in the unconscious thinking processes that underlie depression, anxiety and anger and violence. One of my favorite tools is psycholinguistics, and I’ve been looking at gender differences in both speech content and speech temporal patterns in personal narratives. My research attempts to bring together both empirical approach and queer, feminist and critical theory approaches to psycholinguistics, especially as it pertains to interpersonal narratives and self identity and conceptualization. Some of my current research projects concern implicit gender identity, gender identity threat and their relationship with insecurities, anxiety and aggression.
JoEllen DeLucia
English
1245N
jdelucia@jjay.cuny.edu
212-237-8580
My research interests include eighteenth-century literature, Enlightenment philosophy, post-colonial theory, and women's writing. My current project, 'Tales of Other Times': Scottish Historiography and Enlightenment Feminism, examines eighteenth-century women writers' responses to the development of stadial history and the theories of uneven development that emerged at mid-century from the philosophy, poetry, and historiography of the Scottish Enlightenment.
Auli Ek
English
1273N
aek@jjay.cuny.edu
212-237-8590
I am interested in researching the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality in contemporary American cultural texts--including fiction, film, and autobiography. My book, Race and Masculinity in Contemporary American Prison Narratives (Routledge 2005), is an interdisciplinary analysis of how prison narratives reflect and produce ideologies of racialized masculinity and criminality in the United States. One of the chapters of this book analyzes, for instance, the representations of male-on-male rape in African American prison autobiography. My current research project examines prisoners' wives autobiographies. In all my teaching, there is a strong focus on genders and sexualities as well.
Marcia Esparza
Puerto Rican and Latin American Studies
1550N
mesparza@jjay.cuny.edu
212-237-8667
Marcia Esparza, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Puerto
Rican/Latin American Studies Department at John Jay College of
Criminal Justice. From 1997 through 1999, she undertook research in
Guatemala, working for the Guatemalan Commission to Clarify Past Human
Rights Violations and Acts of Violence That Have Caused the Guatemalan
People to Suffer (HCCG), or Comisión para el Esclarecimiento
Histórico, (CEH).
Dr. Esparza is the Director of the Historical Memory Project, a
resource center documenting state violence and genocide in the
Americas. Her research focus involves violence against women,
particularly women in prison. She has presented her research in
Athens, Greece and Granada, Spain.
Gail Garfield
Sociology
520T
ggarfield@jjay.cuny.edu
212-237-8666
I was the executive director of the Institute on Violence, Inc. for ten-years. The focus of the Institute's activities was on African American women's experiences of violence, and the program areas included: research, policy advocacy, technical support, and outreach and education. Prior to this position, I was the senior policy analyst for human services with the Manhattan Borough President's Office. I also directed the Public Policy Program at St. Peters College in Jersey City, New Jersey. And, I worked as a senior research analyst with the Community Services Society. As an advocate for poor women and children, I have been active in efforts to reshape social policies and practices in the areas of child welfare, public housing, foster care, drug treatment for women, and violence against women. My current book is entitled, Knowing What We Know: African American Women's Experiences of Violence and Violation (2005), published by Rutgers University Press.
Katie Gentile
Women's Center Director/Counseling Department
3322N-3324N
kgentile@jjay.cuny.edu
212-237-8110
I split my time between faculty responsibilities and organizing outreach and educational
programming and providing clinical services to students. My clinical specialties include
sexual abuse, resistance, dating and family violence and eating disorders. My book, Creating
Bodies: Eating disorders as self-destructive survival (The Analytic Press/Routledge, 2007)
integrates psychoanalytic and feminist theories to collaboratively analyze the creation of
time, space and resistance in one woman's diaries. I have published articles on the
relationships between violence, embodiment and eating disorders, and media
representations of pregnancy. I am a Contributing Editor for the interdisciplinary journal Studies in Gender and Sexuality.
Mary Gibson
History Department,
4329N
mgibson@jjay.cuny.edu
(212) 237- 8818
Mary Gibson's research focuses on the history of crime, criminology, women, and sexuality in modern Italy. Her publications include Prostitution and the State in Italy (1986) and Born to Crime: Cesare Lombroso and the Origins of Biological Criminology (2002). She has translated, with Nicole Hahn Rafter, the two major works of Lombroso: Criminal Man (2006) and Criminal Woman, the Prostitute and the Normal Woman (2004). At John Jay College she offers courses on the history of crime and punishment in Europe, women and crime, and comparative criminology. She also teaches in the History Program and the Criminal Justice Program at the Graduate Center of CUNY.
Betsy Gitter
English and Interdisciplinary Studies
egitter@rcn.com
Betsy Gitter is a long-time member of the Women's Studies Committee. She is working on a group biography of three nineteenth-century New England women.
Amy Green
Speech, Theatre & Media Studies and Interdisciplinary Studies
432G T
amysgreen@comcast.net
212-237-8352
One of the first things I was told when I arrived at John Jay in September 1995 was to join the (then) Women's Studies Committee. It turned out to be wonderful advice. The Gender Studies Committee is comprised of a supportive, high-power, intellectually rigorous, and generous group of faculty from all areas of the College. Each semester's roundtables on research and pedagogy provide opportunities for interdisciplinary exchange and brainstorming. My research interests include gender and performance and the performance of gender; women as playwrights, directors, actors, and characters in the American Theater, and feminist revisions of classic dramatic and literary texts. My most recent publication is "Nora's Journey through the Twentieth Century to the Postmodern Stage: Mabou Mines DollHouse," for a critical anthology edited by Sharon Friedman (Macfarland, 2008). A longer-term project is a study of depictions of domestic violence in American drama and film and their relationship to public policy and public discourse on the issue. I have also directed new and established plays by and about women both at John Jay and other theaters.
Jonathan Gray
English
1286N
jgray@jjay.cuny.edu
212-237-8587
I am a member of the English department whose research interests include investigations into matters of gender, especially masculinity. While in grad school I chaired an interdisciplinary conference, Black Masculinities, which investigated the crossroads of race and gender. Current projects include an explorations of the ways that masculinity is constructed and/or interrogated via the consumption of cultural narratives contained in traditionally male discourses like comic books and hip hop music.
Carol Groneman
History and Interdisciplinary Studies
cgronema@jjay.cuny.edu
I am a long-time member of the WSC and of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians. I've taught the history of women, sexuality, and gender and am the author of Nymphomania: A History (Norton, 2000).
Kelly Jeong
English
1240N
kjeong@jjay.cuny.edu
My research areas are modern Korean literature and cinema, Asian modernities, postcolonial studies, and popular culture. An exploration of gender issues is always built into all my research and teaching, and my classroom experiences at JJ have taught me to expect the unexpected from all students, as discussions of gender have led to wonderful dialogues. I am currently working on a book about modernity, gender and nationalism in modern Korean literature and film. My next project will focus on gender, spectacle and violence in a recent Korean trilogy of revenge drama.
Helen Kapstein
English
1269N
hkapstein@jjay.cuny.edu
I specialize in postcolonial literature and theory, contemporary British literature, cultural and media studies, and Anglophone African literature and culture. My current book project, "A New Kind of Safari: Tourism in Postcolonial Literature and Culture," argues that tourism is a nation-making experience.
Allison Kavey
History Department,
4306N
akavey@jjay.cuny.edu
(212) 237- 8819
I work on images of gender, sexuality, and desire, as well as gendered reading and printing practices, in early modern natural philosophy.
Kimora
Law, Police Science and Criminal Justice Administration/Interdisciplinary Studies
432.13 A
kimora@jjay.cuny.edu
(212) 237-8000, ex. 8034
I am drawn to the Gender Studies Committee because I believe it is essential that our students, staff, and faculty at John Jay College of Criminal Justice become sensitive to gender studies issues.
My research and teaching takes me to prisons, jails, treatment centers and halfway houses in New York and Los Angeles. Incorporating gender studies allows all of us to realize that we are all one family.
Anru Lee
Anthropology
Room 434.01 T
alee@jjay.cuny.edu
212-237-8571
A cultural anthropologist, Dr. Anru Lee's research focuses on the Asian Pacific region and issues of capitalism, modernity, gender and sexuality, and urban anthropology. She is the author of In the Name of Harmony and Prosperity: Labor and Gender Politics in Taiwan's Economic Restructuring (SUNY Press 2004) and is co-editor of Women in the New Taiwan: Gender Roles and Gender Consciousness in a Changing Society (ME Sharpe 2004). Her current project investigates mass rapid transit systems as related to issues of technology, governance, and citizenship. Her most recent fieldwork looks at the newly built subway systems in Taiwan in the context of the country's struggle for cultural and national identity.
Kyoo Lee
Philosophy
Room 325.04 T
kylee@jjay.cuny.edu
212-237-8342
Solidly trained in philosophy and literature, and serially distracted by all things academic, Kyoo Lee enjoys thinking and talking about simple curiosities in life.
Her interest in Gender Studies and feminist philosophy has been growing steadily ever since she wrote, circa 2002-3, a literary critical essay entitled "Sex and the City: The Female Gaze, Resilient Body and Urban Desire in the Poetry of Choi Young-mi," a homeopathic cure, perhaps it was, for the boredom of writing a PhD on irony. The text, in part an experimental English translation of ten contemporary Korean poems, later appeared to some critical acclaim in the UK-based journals and magazines such as SOAS Literary Review , Naked Punch and Poetry Review ; during that period of "poetic" traversal, which is also when she transited from the UK to the US, she translated into English a Japanese poem on paternal dandruff and published it in Japan. The current work-in-progress of Kyoo Lee, already an Assistant Professor of Philosophy, includes essays on the disruptive genius of Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, Descartes' best and last friend; gender intrigues in David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly ; affective intersubjectivity in Margueritte Duras' Hiroshima mon amour ; global feminist solidarity and connectivity. Since 2006, she has been involved in organizing and running a feminist philosophical society called PhiloSOPHIA.
Amie A. Macdonald
Philosophy
Suite 325T
212.237.8345
amacdonald@jjay.cuny.edu
My research, scholarship, and teaching are focused on issues of racial
democracy and gender justice in higher education. I am also a member of the Coordinating Team of the Future of Minority Studies Research Project - a consortium of scholars and academic institutions with a primary interest in minority identity, education, and social transformation (http://www.fmsproject.cornell.edu/index.htm). I am the co-author/editor (with Susan Sánchez-Casal) of 21st Century Feminist Classrooms: Pedagogies of Identity and Difference (NY: Palgrave/MacMillan, 2002).
Mark McBeth
English/Composition & Rhetoric
1296N
jjmark.mcbeth@yahoo.com
While working toward my Ph.D. in composition and
rhetoric, I also studied Queer Theory. My interests
look at the intersection between language and
sexuality as well as how our styles of language and
processes of language acquisition can make us
non-normative. In a city like New York where the
diversity of tongues and their dialects abound, the
lens of Queer theory offers a rich alternative to this
linguistic inquiry.
Lorraine Moller
Speech, Theatre & Media Studies
336T
lmoller@jjay.cuny.edu
(212) 237-8320
My earliest research focused on the treatment of masculinity in American film. As a practitioner and researcher, my current area of concentration is in prison theatre. After ten years of working with incarcerated men, I recently began a new program, Theatre Arts Connection, in a New York State facility for women.
Maureen O'Connor
Psychology
2100N
moconnor@jjay.cuny.edu
(212) 237-8776
My scholarly and teaching interests focus on the intersection of Psychology, Gender, and Law. In particular, I've been working on sexual harassment and stalking as examples of issues in which this intersection is pronounced. I taught a doctoral course at the Graduate Center last spring entitled, "Psychology, Gender, and Law," with Distinguished Professor Kay Deaux, one of the leading psychological scholars on gender, which was an exciting experience. We hope to teach it again next spring.
Allison Pease
English
1239 N
apease@jjay.cuny.edu
(212) 237-8565
I am currently serving as Chair of the Gender Studies Committee. I have published in the areas of British modernism, pornography, and aestheticism. My current book project, Modernism and the Bored Woman, explores boredom and other dissociative states in literary representations of women as they coincide with first wave feminism's attempt to articulate a place for women in public culture.
Melinda Powers
English
mpowers@jjay.cuny.edu
(212) 237-8799
My interest in performance theory, historiography, and gender has
informed my study of ancient Greek drama and literature in its
historical context as well as its adaptations on the contemporary
global stage. My article "Dressing-up Dramaturgy in Charles L. Mee's
Bacchae 2.1", for example, compares the the Dressing-up scenes in
Euripides' 405 BCE _Bacchae_ and its 1993 revision in American
playwright and historian Charles L. Mee's _Bacchae 2.1_, and in all my
work I am interested in the perspective that a study of ancient Greek
drama gives to the contemporary world.
Valli Rajah
Sociology
Room 520-39T
vrajah@jjay.cuny.edu
Phone: 212 237-8675
I have been an active member of the Women's Studies Committee since I came to John Jay College in 2003. Broadly speaking, my research focuses on women's lived experience of intimate partner violence. More specifically, my work analyzes how intersectional forms of oppression, such as race and class, both constrain and enable women's acts in situations of intimate partner violence. I have also researched how substance use impacts these dynamics. In collaboration with the Urban Justice Center, I conducted a study of women's experience of police responses to domestic violence in New York City. I am currently involved in a collaborative research effort with Professors Chitra Raghavan and Katie Gentile that examines dating violence among students at John Jay College. As part of this project, I have analyzed how women express agency in their accounts of dating conflict.
Caroline Reitz
English
1270N
creitz@jjay.cuny.edu
(212) 237-2059
I am new to John Jay (September 2006), but gender concerns have always
been central to my research and teaching. My work on the rise and
representation of the detective in the 19th and 20th centuries uses
gender and race as categories of analysis. My current research on
serialized fiction in Victorian periodicals explores the role that
gender played in the imagination of national identity in 19th century
Britain.
Natalie J. Sokoloff
Sociology
Room 520.07T/
nsokolof@jjay.cuny.edu
212-237-8671
I have taught at JJC for almost 35 years during which I have been lucky to teach women's studies classes for most of that time--beginning with the interdisciplinary Sex and Gender course in 1975. I continue to teach courses and do research on women, crime, and justice; imprisonment and empowerment; domestic violence. My two latest books reflect these interests: DOMESTIC VIOLENCE AT THE MARGINS: Readings in Race, Class, Gender and Culture (2005, Rutgers Univ.) and THE CRIMNAL JUSTICE SYSTEM AND WOMEN: Offenders, Prisoners,Victims, and Workers, 3rd Ed.(2004, McGraw-Hill). In 2005 I was honored with the college's Outstanding Teacher Award and the American Society of Criminology's Distinguished Scholarship Award by the Division on Women andCrime. Throughout my work I focus on using a race/class/gender/sexuality/nation intersectional analysis.
Abby Stein
Interdisciplinary Studies
astein@jjay.cuny.edu
212-237-8453
I have taught many courses, and have written extensively, about intimacy, violence, sexuality, domestic assault, and the effect of trauma on individual consciousness-mostly from a psychoanalytic perspective. The WSC offers me an opportunity to learn from a group of women who have considered these issues (and others) in a broader social-political context than I have; I am hoping to expand my knowledgein that direction.
Lori Latrice Sykes
African AmericanStudies
lsykes@jjay.cuny.edu
212-484-1194
Lori Sykes is interested in racial and ethnic inequalities in wealth. Her recent publications address racial and ethnic differences in asset
ownership for non-married black and white women.
Margaret Mikesell Tabb
English
1285N
mtabb@jjay.cuny.edu
(212) 237-8578
My research, on early modern conduct books and English drama, is expressly concerned with gender, with my investigations for many years directed to prescriptions for women and currently to male/female gender systems with a special focus on Hamlet. I am on the planning committee for an interdisciplinary triannual national conference on early modern women (the seventh scheduled for November 2009) which from our first meeting in 1990 has featured a conference structure that we define as "feminist" (i.e. strong involvement in workshops by all participants along with conventional plenary speeches by well-known scholars). I try to include gender awareness in all the classes I teach, with particular interest in how literary conventions are shaped by the period’s prevailing gender ideologies.
Shonna Trinch
Anthropology
433.05T
strinch@jjay.cuny.edu
(646) 557-4403
I am a new faculty member at John Jay College. My scholarly work has focused on Latinas' narratives of domestic violence as they are told in the U.S. legal system. I am a sociolinguist and I collect my data through ethnography. My recent book, Latinas' narratives of domestic abuse: Discrepant Versions of Violence (John Benjamins Publishing 2003) shows how accounts of violence (sometimes referred to as "stories of abuse") often change as a result of victim-survivors' interaction within the various interviewers to whom they must tell of their experiences in dealing with violence and aggression. I have published several articles about the ways in which Latina women and the U.S. criminal justice system intersect and interact both linguistically and culturally. At John Jay College, I teach courses such as, Sex and Culture, Introduction to Anthropology, American Cultural Pluralism and the Law and occasionally, Forensic Linguistics. In each of these courses, we examine how gender serves as an organizing principle for daily life and legal remedies.
Thalia Vrachapolous
Art
thaliav@juno.com
I have been a member of Women's Studies for the past few years and I am committed to the plight of the disenfranchised be they homeless, homosexuals, or battered women. I have curated numerous national and international exhibitions accompanied by scholarly catalogues while teaching visual culture at John Jay. I have written art criticism for NYArts, Visual Culture AD, Part, +-0, Sculpture, and Art in Culture Magazines, and have been included on many international panels. I recently co-authored a reference book published by Edwin Mellen on Hilla Rebay the founder of the Guggenheim Museum and patroness of American art of the modernist era. Although the museum was founded and organized through Rebay's energies throughout the twenties, thirties and forties everyone assumed that it was Solomon Guggenheim who established it. It was important to me and my co-author to right this wrong in the eyes of both the public and recent art to restore Rebay her rightful role both in the international and American art communities.
Alisse Waterston
Anthropology
433T
awaterston@jjay.cuny.edu
(212) 237-8956
My work focuses on the human consequences of structural and systemic violence and inequality. My areas of specialty are urban poverty and policy issues in the U.S. related to destitution, homelessness and substance abuse, health, welfare and criminal justice. In my book, Love, Sorrow and Rage: Destitute Women in a Manhattan Residence (Temple University Press) I tell a story of women and homelessness in New York City. My latest work has two aspects: an intimate ethnography of my own father and a study of Polish-Christian immigrants from northeastern Poland now living in New York. With a focus on the socio-cultural, political-economic and psychological aspects of displacement, diaspora and structural violence, these studies shed light on systemic processes of history, the legacies of culture, and the workings of memory.
