WGSS Program Faculty and Affiliates
Director
Program Faculty
Please see below for Faculty Affiliates.
Tanja Aho Professorial Lecturer CAS - Critical RGC Studies
Dr Tanja Aho is a Professorial Lecturer in American Studies, where Dr Aho teaches classes focused on disability and madness, settler colonialism and racial capitalism, and gender and sexuality. They a…
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, aiming to move beyond critique and the …
K. 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 Asst 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 B. Connelly, Jr. Sr Adj Prof Lecturer
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 Assoc Professor CAS - American Studies
Mary Ellen Curtin has a Ph.d from Duke University and is a historian of modern African American and women's social and political history. Her first book Black Prisoners and Their World documented the …
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, …
Elizabeth Rule Asst 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 issues…
Elke Stockreiter Assoc 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…
Sybil Williams Director of African American and African Diaspora Studies CAS - Critical RGC Studies
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…
Faculty Affiliates
Juliet Bellow Assoc 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 and 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 Assoc Professor CAS - Literature
Dustin Friedman's fields of research and teaching are Victorian and modernist literature, aestheticism and Decadence, queer theory, the history and theory of aesthetics, and global nineteenth-century …
Kate Haulman Assoc 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 - School of Communication
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 Assoc Professor CAS - World Languages and Cultures
Professor Martínez 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 Assoc Professor CAS - Philosophy and Religion
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 Assoc Professor SPA - Justice, Law and Criminology
Dr. Jane Palmer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Justice, Law & Criminology.
Palmer’s research interests are barriers to help-seeking, transformative justice and anti-carceral …
Ying-Chen Peng Asst 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…
Margaret Twigg Sr Professorial Lecturer CAS - Literature
Salvador Vidal-Ortiz Assoc Professor CAS - Sociology
Dr. Vidal-Ortiz's scholarship cuts across racialization, sexuality, gender, migration and religion, and is interdisciplinary. He coedited two award winning books: …
Lauren Weis Sr Professorial Lecturer CAS - Philosophy and Religion
I joined the American University faculty in 2008, and have been teaching courses in the history of philosophy, metaphysics, ethics, gender studies, and feminist theory. My philosophical research focus…
Sherri Williams Asst Professor SOC - School of Communication
At the intersection of social media, social justice, reality television, mass media and how people of color use and are represented by these mediums is where you'll find Dr. Sherri Williams. Williams …
Gay Young Department Chair, Sociology CAS - Sociology
(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 Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Philosophy CAS - Philosophy and Religion
Perry Zurn is Associate Professor of Philosophy at American University, and affiliate faculty in the Department of Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies. He researches primarily in political phil…