WGSS Program Faculty and Affiliates
Director
Program Faculty
Please see below for Faculty Affiliates.
Tanja Aho Senior Professorial Lecturer CAS | Critical RGC Studies
Dr Tanja Aho is a Senior Professorial Lecturer and the Director of American Studies and the Disability, Health, and Bodies (DHB) Certificate. Dr Aho teaches the core classes of the DHB Certificate as …
Irene Calis Director, Arab World Studies CAS | Critical RGC Studies
Irene Calis is a decolonial scholar, educator, and organizer. Her research focuses on emancipatory politics from the perspective of those living their struggle. Through a comparative frame of analysis…
Tyler Christensen Professorial Lecturer CAS | Critical RGC Studies
K. Tyler Christensen holds a PhD in American Literature & Culture from the English Department at The George Washington University. The expanse of his doctoral work is concerned with storytelling that …
Mali Collins Assistant Professor CAS | Critical RGC Studies
Mali Collins’ research areas include Black motherhood studies, Black archival studies, 20th and 21st century literature and art, medical humanities, digital technology, and reproductive health and jus…
Robert Connelly Adjunct Senior Professorial Lecturer CAS | Critical RGC Studies
Bob Connelly is a senior adjunct professorial lecturer of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Bob received his M.F.A. in Film and Electronic Media at American University, and began teaching LGBTQ f…
Mary Ellen Curtin Associate Professor CAS | Critical RGC Studies
Mary Ellen Curtin is a historian of modern African American and women's social and political history. Her first book BLACK PRISONERS AND THEIR WORLD, ALABAMA, 1865-1900 (University Press of Virginia, …
Eileen Findlay Professor and Department Chair, Critical RGC Studies CAS | Critical RGC Studies
Eileen Findlay graduated from Oberlin College and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she held a Jacob Javits fellowship. Both her books, 'We Are Left Without a Father Here': Masculinity, Dome…
Christina Riley Professorial Lecturer CAS | Critical RGC Studies
Christina Riley’s research focuses on the cultural dynamics of group collectivity and their ensuing on/offline sociopolitical relays. Christina is particularly invested in digital group coherence and …
Sybil Roberts Director of African American and African Diaspora Studies CAS | Performing Arts
Sybil R. Williams has spent the past twelve years cultivating her craft as a playwright and dramaturg. Her work has been professionally produced by Chicago’s ETA Creative Arts Theatre; New York’s Nati…
Elizabeth Rule Assistant Professor CAS | Critical RGC Studies
Dr. Elizabeth Rule (enrolled citizen of the Chickasaw Nation) is an Assistant Professor of Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies at American University in Washington, DC. Rule’s research on issue…
Elke Stockreiter Associate Professor CAS | History
Elke Stockreiter is a historian of modern Africa. Her research and teaching interests include the histories of colonialism, gender, race, and slavery in Africa and the Indian Ocean World. Trained as a…
Faculty Affiliates
Juliet Bellow Associate Professor CAS | Art
Juliet Bellow’s research centers on visual artists' experimentations with intermediality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her book Modernism on Stage: The Ballets Russes and the P…
Tim Doud Professor CAS | Art
Tim Doud’s paintings and drawings address two seemingly distinct bodies of work, one figurative and one abstract. These bodies of works serve as a backdrop to broader discussions around constructed id…
Ellen Feder Professor CAS | Philosophy/Religion
Ellen K. Feder is the William Fraser McDowell Professor of Philosophy and Social Policy. She works at the intersection of contemporary continental philosophy and feminist and critical race theory, par…
Dustin Friedman Associate Professor CAS | Literature
Dustin Friedman's fields of research and teaching are Victorian and modern literature, aestheticism and decadence, queer theory, the history and theory of aesthetics, and global nineteenth-century wri…
Naima Hachad Associate Professor CAS | World Languages and Cultures
Dr. Hachad’s research focuses on issues of gender and sexuality, autobiography and testimony, and the representation and memorialization of violence in cultural productions of the Maghreb and the Cari…
Kate Haulman Associate Professor CAS | History
Kate Haulman researches and teaches the history of early North America and US women's and gender history. She is the author of The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America (University of Nort…
Leena Jayaswal Professor SOC | Film & Media Arts
Leena Jayaswal is a documentary filmmaker, award-winning photographer and Professor in the School of Communication at American University in Washington DC, where she is the director of the new BA in P…
Juliana Martinez Associate Professor CAS | World Languages and Cultures
Professor MartÃnez focuses on the intersection of violence and body politics in Latin America. Her two main areas of research are: representation of historical violence recent cultural production; and…
Amy Oliver Associate Professor Emerita
Professor Oliver's teaching and research on Latin America explore philosophical topics such as marginality, feminism, nepantlismo, and transfronterismo. She works on the Hispanic ess…
Jane Palmer Associate Professor SPA | Justice, Law & Criminology
Dr. Jane Palmer is an Associate Professor with a primary focus on community-based participatory research, help-seeking, community-based responses to harm, and ending gender-based violence.
Sh…
Ying-Chen Peng Associate Professor CAS | Art
Dr. Peng specializes in late imperial and modern Chinese art history with a focus on gender issues and globalization of material culture. Before joining the American University she worked at the Natio…
Diane Singerman Associate Prof Emeritus
Dr. Singerman is an Associate Professor and comparativist whose research interests focus on political change from below, particularly in the Middle East, and more specifically Egypt. Her work examines…
Marnie Twigg Senior Professorial Lecturer CAS | Literature
Lauren Weis Sr Professorial Lecturer and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Philosophy CAS | Philosophy/Religion
I earned a PhD in Philosophy from Boston College specializing in Continental and History of Philosophy with a focus on ethics, metaphysics and epistemology, gender studies and feminist theory. Since j…
Sherri Williams Assistant Professor SOC | Journalism
Dr. Sherri Williams is a race and representation researcher who teaches about how media images are connected to and uphold oppression and inequality. Williams, who was a journalist for a decade before…
Gay Young Prof Emerita
(Gloria A.) Gay Young has a longstanding focus on gender and development (GAD) which has led her to study a range of issues, including the nature and consequences of women’s labor force participation …
Perry Zurn Provost Associate Professor CAS | Philosophy/Religion
Perry Zurn is Provost Associate Professor of Philosophy at American University, and affiliate faculty in the Department of Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies, the Honors Program, and the Antir…