Executive Board

The Executive Board is the governing body of the Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies Program and The Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies. Members represent the larger GSWS-FQT faculty community in decisions of import to the Program and the Center and are actively involved in developing and supporting the governing, programming, and pedagogical activities of GSWS and FQT. Executive Board members serve for three years; terms are staggered to provide continuity.

For more information, please contact GSWS-APC@sas.upenn.edu

Abdulhamit Arvas

Abdulhamit Arvas is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his PhD in English, with additional specialization in Women’s and Gender Studies, from Michigan State University. Prior to joining Penn English, Dr. Arvas was Assistant Professor of Theater at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Vassar College....

English
Term Ends: 2024

David Azzolina

Presently David's collection responsibilities include Religion, Folklore, Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, and the History and Sociology of Science. He also has broad experience with U.S. and British government publications. David manages the Reference collection at Van Pelt Library and is the bibliographer for the Yarnall collection, a specialized Anglican studies collection. David has...

Penn Libraries
Term Ends: 2024

Sarah Banet-Weiser

Sarah Banet-Weiser’s teaching and research interests include gender in the media, citizenship, consumer culture, popular media, and race and the media. 

Sarah Banet-Weiser is Distinguished Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication and Professor of Communication at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and...


Term Ends: 2025

Nancy Bentley

Nancy Bentley is Donald T. Regan Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses on topics in American literature and culture, sexuality, kinship studies, and law and literature. Her most recent book is Frantic Panoramas: American Literature and Mass Culture, 1870-1920 (University of Pennsylvania, 2009). She co-authored Volume Three of the ...

English
Term Ends: S2021

Julia Bloch

Julia Bloch (MFA, PhD) is Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of three books of poetry, has received the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching by Affiliated Faculty, and has been awarded a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. Her current scholarly book in progress investigates generic concordance and contention in the innovative North American...

Creative Writing Program
Term Ends: 2023

S. Pearl Brilmyer

S. Pearl Brilmyer's work lies at the intersection of the history of philosophy, science, and literature with a focus on the nineteenth-century English novel. Other areas of research include theories of will and drive in nineteenth-century German philosophy and science (Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Freud, Reich), the history of sexuality, and materialisms old and new.

English
Term Ends: 2025

Kathleen Brown

Kathleen Brown is a historian of gender and race in early America and the Atlantic World. Educated at Wesleyan and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, she is author of Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1996), which won the Dunning Prize of the American Historical Association. Her second book, Foul Bodies...

History
Term Ends: 2023

Hsiao-wen Cheng

Hsiao-wen Cheng is a cultural and intellectual historian of China's middle period (9th-14th centuries), interested in issues related to gender, sexuality, medicine, and religion. Her first book Divine, Demonic, and Disordered: Women without Men in Song Dynasty China explores the unstable meanings attached to the bodies of "manless women" in medical and religious literature as well as...

East Asian Languages and Civilizations
Term Ends: 2023 (on leave 2021-2022)

André Dombrowski

André Dombrowski’s research and teaching center on the arts and material cultures of France and Germany, and their empires, in the mid to late nineteenth century. He is particularly concerned with the social and intellectual rationales behind the emergence of avant-garde painting in the 1860s to 1880s, including Impressionism. Committed to interdisciplinary inquiry, he places the development...

History of Art
Term Ends: 2024

Akira Drake Rodriguez

Akira Drake Rodriguez is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design. Her research examines the ways that disenfranchised groups re-appropriate their marginalized spaces in the city to gain access to and sustain urban political power. She is the author of Diverging Space for Deviants: The Politics of Atlanta’s Public Housing, which explores how...

Weitzman School of Design
Term Ends: 2024

Siyen Fei

Siyen Fei received her PhD degree from Stanford University in 2004. She teaches and researches Chinese history at Penn. Her work to date is primarily concerned with the political and cultural activism of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Ming dynasty China (1368-1644). Examining the action of wide-ranging historical actors—women, urbanites, and border residents—she engages and expands...

History
Term Ends: 2023

Ian Fleishman

Ian Fleishman is an Assistant Professor of German and Cinema & Media Studies and Graduate Chair of the Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania. He holds a doctorate in French and German Literature from Harvard University. His work focuses largely on sex and violence in order to trace the evolution of narrative form and its underlying...

German and Cinema & Media Studies
Term Ends: 2023

Pilar Gonalons-Pons

Dr. Gonalons-Pons’s research examines how work, families, and public policies structure economic inequalities, with a particular focus on how inequalities change over time and over the life course. She employs quantitative techniques and longitudinal datasets from multiple countries along with content analyses of documents and interview data.

Sociology, Population Studies Center
Term Ends: 2024

Kathryn Hellerstein

Kathryn Hellerstein is Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, specializing in Yiddish, and the Ruth Meltzer Director of the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania.  Her books include a translation and study of Moyshe-Leyb Halpern's poems, In New York: A Selection, (Jewish Publication Society, 1982), Paper Bridges:  Selected Poems of Kadya...

Germanic Languages
Term Ends: 2024

Sukaina Hirji

I am an Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Pennsylvania. I work both in ancient philosophy and in contemporary ethics. Much of my work explores the Aristotelian idea that there is something intrinsically valuable about developing and exercising capacities that are central to our nature as human beings.  See my research page for more information

Philosophy
Term Ends: 2023

Nancy Hirschmann

Nancy J. Hirschmann is Professor of Political Science at The University of Pennsylvania, where she has served as Director of the Program on Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies and the Alice Paul Center for Research on Gender, Sexuality and Women, and Vice Chair of the Department of Political Science. She previously taught at Cornell University for 12 years, and Swarthmore College.  She is...

Political Science
Term Ends: S2021

Charlotte Jacobs

Charlotte E. Jacobs earned her Ph.D. in the Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education program at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. Her research interests focus on issues related to the intersections of identity, race, and gender in education concerning students and teachers, and participatory action research methods. To this end, Charlotte recently...


Term Ends: 2025

Melissa Jensen

Melissa Jensen is current faculty in the Penn English Department. She is also an award-winning writer of historical and contemporary fiction. Most recently, her Young Adult novels have been official selections on such lists as New York Public Library's Teen Reading and FYA. She is currently working on the fourth and final book in her Philadelphia novel series and a play centered around bog...


Term Ends: 2025

Jasmine Johnson

Jasmine Elizabeth Johnson is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies. Her work explores the politics of black movement including dance, diasporic travel, and gentrification. Johnson's interdisciplinary research and teaching are situated at the intersection of diaspora theory, dance and performance studies, ethnography, and black feminisms.

Africana Studies
Term Ends: 2023

Ayako Kano

Dr. Kano’s research focuses on the intersection of gender, performance, and politics, in the context of Japanese cultural history from the 19th century to the present. Her first book (Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan: Theater, Gender, and Nationalism, Palgrave2001), focused on the first generation of actresses in modern Japanese theater. Her second book (Japanese Feminist...

East Asian Languages & Civilizations
Term Ends: 2024

Jonathan D. Katz

Jonathan D. Katz is perhaps the founding figure in queer art history, responsible for the very first queer scholarship on a number of artists beginning in the early 1990s. His scholarship spans a period from the late 19th-century to the present, with an emphasis on the US, but with serious attention to Europe, Latin America and Asia as well. He has written extensively about gender, sexuality...


Term Ends: 2024

David Kazanjian

David Kazanjian received his PhD from the Rhetoric Department at the University of California, Berkeley, his M.A. in Critical Theory from the University of Sussex, and his B.A. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University. His area of specialization is transnational American literary and historical studies through the 19th century. His additional fields of research are political...

English
Term Ends: 2025

Brian Kim

D. Brian Kim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a specialist in Russian literature of the long nineteenth century, translation studies, and literary and cultural relationships between Russia, Western Europe, and East Asia.

Department of Russian and East European Studies
Term Ends: 2023

So-Rim Lee

So-Rim Lee is a Korea Foundation Assistant Professor of Korean Studies in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. So-Rim’s research and teaching explore the politics of representation in visual cultures and everyday embodiment in South Korea and the Korean diaspora from the intersection of performance studies, gender and sexuality studies,...

East Asian Languages and Civilizations
Term Ends: 2024

Jessa Lingel

Jessa Lingel is an associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, where she studies digital culture, looking for the ways that relationships to technology can show us gaps in power or possibilities for social change. She received her Ph.D. in Communication and Information from Rutgers University. She has an MLIS from Pratt Institute and an M.A. from New York University. In her...

Annenberg School for Communication
Term Ends: 2024

Serena Mayeri

Serena Mayeri is Professor of Law and History at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Mayeri’s scholarship focuses on the historical impact of progressive and conservative social movements on legal and constitutional change. Her history of feminist legal advocacy in the 1960s and 1970s, Reasoning from Race: Feminism, Law, and the Civil Rights Revolution (Harvard University Press...

Law
Term Ends: 2024

Brooke O'Harra

Brooke O’Harra joined the UPenn Theatre Arts faculty in July 2016. Brooke has previously taught at NYU Tisch School of the Arts Drama Department and the Experimental Theater Wing, Mt. Holyoke College and Bates College. Her fields of interest include Japanese theater, experimental theater, serial drama, LGBTQ theater and performance, performance with live media and contemporary visual art.


Term Ends: 2025

Felicity Paxton

Felicity (Litty) Paxton is the Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies at the Annenberg School for Communication.Born and raised in the United Kingdom, Litty Paxton received a Ph.D. in American Civilization and a Graduate Certificate in Women's Studies from Penn. She has taught at the University of East Anglia and at Emory University as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Myth and Ritual...

Annenberg
Term Ends: 2023

Keisha-Khan Perry

Feminist anthropologist and political activist, Keisha-Khan Y. Perry is the Presidential Penn Compact Associate Professor of Africana Studies. She writes on urban social movements fighting against the violence of forced displacement. She is the author of the prize-winning book, Black Women against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil (University of Minnesota Press,...


Term Ends: 2025

Teemu Ruskola

Teemu Ruskola is Professor of Chinese Law and Society as well as Professor of Law.  He is a scholar of Chinese law and society in a comparative and global context, with an interest in China’s place and role in the development of social theory.  He is the author of Legal Orientalism: China, the United States, and Modern Law (Harvard University Press, 2013), co-author of Schlesinger...

East Asian Languages & Civilizations
Term Ends: 2025

Grace Sanders Johnson

Grace L. Sanders Johnson is Assistant Professor of Africana Studies. She received her Ph.D. in History & Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan where she specialized in Modern Caribbean and Latin American History, Transnational Feminisms, Oral History, and African Diasporic Studies. Grace has been awarded fellowships from the Thomas J. Watson Foundation, the Andrew C. Mellon and...

Africana Studies
Term Ends: S2025

Dani Smith

Prof. Smith is the J. Peter Skirkanich Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, with appointments in the Departments of Bioengineering, Electrical & Systems Engineering, Physics & Astronomy, Neurology, and Psychiatry. They are also an external professor of the Santa Fe Institute. Smith is most well-known for blending neural and systems engineering to identify fundamental mechanisms...


Term Ends: 2025

Deborah A. Thomas

Deborah A. Thomas is the R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania.  She is also core faculty in Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, holds a secondary appointment with the Graduate School of Education, and is a member of the graduate groups in English, Africana Studies, and the School of Social Policy and Practice.  Prior...

Anthropology
Term Ends: 2024

Filippo Trentin

Filippo Trentin is a Lecturer in Italian studies, film studies and queer studies at the University of Pennsylvania, which he joined in 2016-17 as an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Humanities. After getting his Ph.D. at the University of Warwick (UK) in 2014 he held academic positions as Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute of Cultural...

Cinema & media studies
Term Ends: S2025

Whitney Trettien

Whitney Trettien is a scholar, teacher, and assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work explores the deep history of literary technologies, from early printed books and library classification systems to digital forms and formats. Her first book project, Cut/Copy/Paste, tells the story of three marginal early modern communities that published bespoke books with...

English
Term Ends: 2023

Lance Wahlert

Lance Wahlert is Assistant Professor of Medicine and Program Director of the Master of Bioethics (MBE) in the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy in the Perelman School of Medicine. Dr. Wahlert is also the Director of the Project on Bioethics, Sexuality, and Gender Identity, which has demarcated a sub-field within bioethics that focuses on the intersection of LGBTQ issues and...

Medical Ethics and Health Policy
Term Ends: 2024