About
The GCWS is governed by a dedicated Board of Directors. Board members are selected by each participating insitution’s Women’s Studies Program. The Board of Directors 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.
2011-2012 Board of Directors
BOSTON COLLEGE
Kalpana Rahita Seshadri (English) is Associate Professor of English at Boston College. She specializes in post-colonial theory, Anglophone literatures, and critical theory with an emphasis in psychoanalysis and Marxism. Her publications include Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race (2000), and The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies (2000).
BOSTON UNIVERSITY
Carrie Preston is Assistant Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Boston University. She received her Ph.D. from Rutgers University in Literature with a Women’s Studies Certification. Her research and teaching interests include women’s literature and performance, modernism/postmodernism, feminist theory, gender studies, and dance. Her book, Modernism’s Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, Solo Performance, was released in Oxford University Press’s Modernist Literature and Culture Series in 2011. Essays on modernist art and culture have appeared in Modernism/Modernity, Theatre Journal, and Twentieth-Century Literature. She is currently working on a new book project called Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, and the Pedagogies of Transnational Performance, which will examine the influence of noh drama on international modernist theater, poetry, and dance with chapters on W. B. Yeats, Ito Michio, Ezra Pound, Bertolt Brecht, Benjamin Britten, and Samuel Beckett.
BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY
Harleen Singh is Assistant Professor of Literature at Brandeis University. Her research interests include colonial and postcolonial theory and literature, specifically nineteenth and twentieth century British and South Asian literature, as well as gende rand Women's Studies, Film Studies, and South Asian Studies. She has published numerous articles in journals and collections such as: Ariel: A Review of International English Literature; South Asian Diaspora; and Sikh Formations, among others.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Robin Bernstein is Associate Professor of African and African American Studies and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. She is a cultural historian who specializes in U.S. performance and theatre from the nineteenth century to the present. Her interests include formations of race, age, gender, and sexuality, and her research integrates the study of theatrical, visual, material, and literary evidence. Her new book,Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, was published by New York University Press in 2011. Other books include the anthologiesCast Out: Queer Lives in Theater (Univeristy of Michigan Press) and Generation Q (Alyson) as well as a Jewish feminist children's book titled Terrible, Terrible! She is currently writing a book titled Paradoxy: Lesbians and the Everyday Art of the Impossible.
MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
Elizabeth Wood is Professor of History at MIT. She is the author of Performing Justice: Agitation Trials in Early Soviet Russia (Cornell University Press, 2005) and From Baba to Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Indiana University Press, 1997). She has also published articles on prostitution, trade union organizing of women, and revolutionary theater trials. She has been Program Chair for the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, AAASS. She is currently working on what she is calling "The Performance of Power" under Putin in Russia today. This spring she received a grant from the Alumni Class Funds, "Bringing Russian and Soviet History into the Digital Age."
NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY
Carla Kaplan is the Davis Distinguished Professor of American Literature at Northeastern University. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow and Fellow at the Harvard W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. Her books include Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters (Doubleday) and the forthcoming Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Rennaissance (HarperCollins).
SIMMONS COLLEGE
Jo Trigilio is Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and Philosophy at Simmons College. She has a special interest in the intersection of theory and practice. She specializes in oppression/liberation theories, including feminist and gender theories, race theories, and queer theory. She is politically active in the queer community of Boston and has served on the board of directors for the National Women's and Gender Studies Association for six years. She is currently leading the Boston Dyke March History and Archive Project.
TUFTS UNIVERSITY
Christina Sharpe is Associate Professor of English at Tufts University and Director of the American Studies Program. Her research interests include African American Literature; Multi-Ethnic Literature; African DIaspora Literature; Cultural Studies; and Visual Culture, among others. She was the recipient of a Ford Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellowship, the Woodrow Wilson Post-Doctoral Fellowship, and the Rockefeller Fellowship. Her book, Monstorous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects was published by Duke University Press in 2010. Her current book project is Memory and Forgetting: Blackness and Whiteness in Cultures of Surprise.
UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS BOSTON
Elora Halim Chowdhury is Associate Professor of Women's Studies and Asian Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her research and teaching interests include transnational and postcolonial feminisms, critical development studies, and human rights advocacy with an emphasis on South Asia. She is the author of Transnationalism Reversed: Women Organizing Against Gendered Violence in Bangladesh (SUNY Press 2011), which was the recipient of the National Women's Studies Association Gloria E. Anzaldua book prize. Her current project is titled, Dissident Friendships: Imperialism, Feminism and the Possibility of Transnational Solidarities..
Next Steps
- Overview
- History & Mission
- Member Institutions and Programs
- Publications
- Board of Directors
- Founding Members
- Staff
Course List
- Workshop for Dissertation Writers in Women's and Gender Studies
Fall & Spring
September 4, 2013 – May 7, 2014 - Understanding Pornography
Fall
Contact the GCWS with meeting day and time - Feminist Inquiry
Spring
January 29, 2014 - May 7, 2014 - Screen Women: Body Narratives in Popular American Film
Spring
January 27, 2014 – May 5, 2014 - Queer Theory and Politics
Spring
January 28, 2014 – May 6, 2014
Contact Us
The Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 14N-211
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139
Phone: 617-324-2085
