Graduate Consortium of Women's Studies

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.

Current GCWS Board of Directors

BOSTON COLLEGE
Marilynn S Johnson is Professor of History at Boston College where she teaches modern US urban and social history. She received her Ph.D. in history at New York University and has taught at Southern Methodist University and the Graduate Consortium in Women’s Studies at MIT. Her research focuses on migration, urban social relations, race, gender and violence. Her books include The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II (1993) and Street Justice: A History of Police Violence in New York City (2004). Most recently, she published The New Bostonians: How Immigrants Have Transformed the Metro Area Since the 1960s (2015). She now directs a public history website called Global Boston, which explores and documents immigration history in greater Boston.

BOSTON UNIVERSITY

Anthony Petro is assistant professor of Religion and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Boston University. His first book, After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion (Oxford, 2015), examined the history of U.S. religious responses to the AIDS crisis and their role in the promotion of a national moral discourse on sex. His current project, “Provoking Religion: Sex, Art, and the Sacred in Modern America,” looks at how a range of queer and feminist artists have engaged religious themes and ritual in their work since the 1970s, exploring how this archive of visual and performance art helps us to rethink key categories in the study of religion and in gender and sexuality studies. He has published essays on a number of topics, including the queer archive of Catholic sexual abuse, critical disability studies, religion and camp politics, and religion, race, and sexuality in North American religions.

BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY
Bernadette Brooten , Robert and Myra Kraft and Jacob Hiatt Professor of Christian Studies; of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; and of Classical Studies; and chairs Religious Studies at Brandeis University, is founder and director of the Brandeis Feminist Sexual Ethics Project. This project aims to create Jewish, Christian, and Muslim sexual ethics rooted in freedom, mutuality, meaningful consent, responsibility, and the pleasure of each participant, untainted by slave-holding values. Overcoming the legacy of slavery, within religion and in U.S. history, is central to the Project. The legacy includes: religious marriage law that is conceptually connected to slave law, inequitable treatment of Black rape complainants in the U.S. criminal justice system, and harmful racial-sexual stereotypes. In collaboration with Laurie Nsiah-Jefferson and Jessica Yanick Pierre, she is researching hindrances faced by Black college women to reporting sexual and racial harassment and violence, and she is currently writing a book on early Christian women who were enslaved or who owned enslaved laborers. Previous publications include: Women Leaders in The Ancient Synagogue: Inscriptional Evidence and Background Issues (1982), Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (1996), for which she received three awards, and, with the editorial assistance of Jacqueline L. Hazelton, she edited >Beyond Slavery: Overcoming Its Religious and Sexual Legacies (2010). She has also published on various topics in ancient Jewish and early Christian history. In addition to a MacArthur Fellowship, she has held fellowships from the Harvard Law School, the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies, and many other agencies. The University of Bern awarded her a Dr. Theol., h.c., in 2014. She previously taught at the School of Theology at Claremont, the Claremont Graduate School, the University of Tübingen, Harvard University, the University of Oslo, and Williams College. .

HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Genevieve Clutario is Assistant Professor of History and History and Literature at Harvard University. Her work specializes in interdisciplinary and transnational feminist approaches to historicize racial and gendered formations under modern empire building in the Philippines and across the Global South. Her research and teaching focus on gender history, Asian American Studies, and comparative empires.

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

Lerna Ekmekçioğlu is McMillan-Stewart Associate Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she is also affiliated with the Women and Gender Studies Program. She received her PhD from the New York University’s joint program of History and Middle Eastern/Islamic Studies (2010). In 2006, together with Melissa Bilal, she published the first anthology in any language dedicated to Armenian feminists. The co-edited book is in Turkish and titled A Cry for Justice: Five Armenian Feminist Writers from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic (1862–1933). Her first monograph, Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belonging in Post-Genocide Turkey (Stanford U. Press, 2016), focuses on the surviving Armenians who remained in Istanbul after the genocide. Currently she is collaborating with Melissa Bilal for a book and digital humanities project titled Feminism in Armenian: An Interpretive Anthology and Digital Archive which focuses on the life and works of twelve pioneering women intellectuals who were active from 1860s to 1960s.

NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY
Linda Blum, Professor of Sociology at Northeastern University, is a qualitative, ethnographic sociologist interested in persistence, change, and contradictions in contemporary U.S. gender relations. She began her sociological career studying women’s grassroots movements for comparable pay, but more recently has focused on ideologies of motherhood, how we judge fit and unfit, respectable and disreputable, and measure mothers against each other in ways that reinforce class and race inequality. She is the author of Between Feminism and Labor: The Significance of the Comparable Worth Movement (1991, University of California Press); At the Breast: Ideologies of Breastfeeding and Motherhood in the Contemporary United States (1999, Beacon); and Raising Generation Rx: Mothering Kids with Invisible Disabilities in an Age of Inequality (2015, NYU Press), which received the 2016 Outstanding Publication Award from the Disability and Society Section of the American Sociological Association.

SIMMONS COLLEGE
Suzanne Leonard is an Associate Professor of English at Simmons College, and co-coordinator of the college's interdisciplinary minor in Cinema and Media Studies. She is 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).

TUFTS UNIVERSITY
Freeden Blume Oeur is Associate Professor of Sociology at Tufts University, and faculty affiliate with the program in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. He is the current senior co-chair of GCWS. His research interests include masculine power, feminist theory, neoliberalism, and Black politics. He is the author of two books: Black Boys Apart: Racial Uplift and Respectability in All-Male Public Schools (2018), and (with Edward W. Morris) Unmasking Masculinities: Men and Society (2017). Blume Oeur has been recognized multiple times for his teaching and mentoring, most recently as the 2018 recipient of the Tufts University Recognition of Undergraduate Teaching Excellence Award.

UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS BOSTON
Chris Bobel is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston where she teaches courses on Gender and the Body, Feminist Theory, Feminist Research Methods, Women in US Social Movements and Feminist Activism. Her scholarship lies at the intersection of social movements, gender, health and embodiment, or how feminist thinking becomes feminist doing at the most intimate and immediate levels. Her books include The Managed Body: Developing Girls and Menstrual Health in the Global South (Palgrave Macmillan) and a co-edited collection (with Samantha Kwan) titled Body Battlegrounds: Transgressions, Tensions, and Transformations (Vanderbilt University Press) due out in 2018 and 2019 respectively. She is also at work co-editing the first ever Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies.

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