People: Women and Gender Studies Faculty
Mary Margaret Fonow
Professor and Director of the School of Social Transformation
marymargaret.fonow@asu.edu | Curriculum Vitae (PDF)
Mary Margaret Fonow was named Director of Women and Gender Studies in 2004 and Director of the School of Social Transformation in 2008. Before joining the Arizona State University faculty she was an Associate Professor of Women's Studies at the Ohio State University. Her research interests include feminism and transnational labor activism, women and work, and social movements. Fonow has conducted comparative research on workplace change in U.S., Canada and Australia and has recently concluded a study of women's transnational labor activism in male dominated unions in the metal trades. Her new work focuses on the reformulation of labor rights and women's rights as human rights. Fonow provides national leadership for the research training of doctoral students in the field of women and gender studies and is a member of the UNESCO Women and Gender Research Network. She has served on the editorial boards of Gender & Society, NWSA Journal, Frontiers: A Journal of Women's Studies, and the Australian Journal of Sociology.
Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies and Theatre
lmanderson@asu.edu
Lisa Anderson's current research interests include contemporary black feminist theatre and drama, the performance of gender and race and gender in popular culture. She recently completed a book manuscript on black feminist aesthetics in contemporary drama; it is under review at University of Illinois Press.She is also writing articles about race and civil war films, and butch/femme embodiment in the U.S. and Mexico. Anderson teaches courses on film and performance in women and gender studies; and is also part of the faculty of the Theatre of the Americas doctoral program in theatre, where she teaches courses on African American theatre and theatre semiotics.
Elizabeth Archuleta
Assistant Professor of Women and Gender Studies
Elizabeth.Archuleta@asu.edu | Curriculum Vitae (PDF)
Elizabeth Archuleta specializes in representations of contemporary Indigenous women in visual and narrative culture, the development of an Indigenous feminist theory, and intersections between law and literature. She teaches courses on women and popular culture, intersectionality, and Indigenous women. She has several published articles in peer-reviewed journals and has contributed to two edited collections. In 2007, she received the Gilberto Espinosa Prize for best article from New Mexico Historical Review and Diverse Issues in Higher Education selected her as an “Emerging Scholar.” In 2008–2009, she was awarded a Ford Diversity Postdoctoral Fellowship. Archuleta serves on the Advisory Board for the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. Her current book-length manuscript analyzes visual and narrative culture across a broad expanse of time to show why property regimes are central to Indigenous women’s representations within idealized visions of womanhood and femininity that have also privileged a (white) family imperative and national identity. She documents Indigenous women’s responses to these multiple, shifting, and dynamic sets of property relationships that developed after conquest and white settler development and that form the foundations for an Indigenous feminist theory.
Alesha Durfee
Assistant Professor of Women and Gender Studies
alesha.durfee@asu.edu | Curriculum Vitae (PDF)
Alesha Durfee received a Ph.D. in Sociology and a Graduate Certificate in Women Studies from the University of Washington in 2005. Her work explores the ways that structural inequalities both constrain and are reinforced by individual behavior, and assesses the impacts of social policies implemented in an attempt to ameliorate these inequalities. She is particularly interested in how the status characteristics of individuals, such as gender, race, class, or sexuality, affect their interactions with the legal system, institutions, and other individuals. To date her research has focused on domestic violence and the justice system, mandatory arrest policies for domestic violence, child care utilization and policy, and welfare reform. Her current research focuses on the social construction of domestic violence victimization, and how gender influences how narratives of violence are constructed and interpreted in the justice system.
Georganne Scheiner Gillis
Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies
georganne.scheiner@asu.edu | Curriculum Vitae (PDF)
Yasmina KatsulisAssistant Professor of Women and Gender Studies
yasmina.katsulis@asu.edu | Curriculum Vitae (PDF)
Yasmina Katsulis is a medical anthropologist who specializes in research on the structural determinants of gender and sexual health disparities, particularly among at-risk youth. She teaches undergraduate courses on sexuality, women's global health and human rights, and an annual pro-seminar on HIV/AIDS, graduate-level courses on gender and sexuality studies, and gender-based health disparities in resource-poor settings. She received her doctoral degree in Anthropology from Yale University (2003), and received post-doctoral training through NIMH-supported Research Institute, the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS (School of Epidemiology and Public Health, Yale University). Her book Sex Work and the City: The Social Geography of Health and Safety in Tijuana Mexico, is based on research supported by the National Science Foundation, was released by the University of Texas Press in 2009. With the generous support of the Institute for Social Science Research CATALYST grant program, Katsulis recently completed a project based on life history interviews with former foster youth in the Phoenix Valley. This is the first step in a larger project that will utilize ethnographic methods to understand the gender socialization process among youth in group homes, and the impact that this has on their sexual and reproductive health and well-being. Additional information regarding course syllabi, research interests, and experience can be found on her website http://www.profkat.info/.
Sally Kitch
Professor of Women and Gender Studies
Director of the Institute for Humanities Research
skitch@asu.edu | Curriculum Vitae (PDF)
Sally L. Kitch is the founding director of the Institute for Humanities Research and college professor of women and gender studies at Arizona State University. She is also professor emerita of women’s studies at Ohio State University, where she served as professor from 1992 to 2006, department chair of women’s studies from 1992 to 2000 and vice chair from 2004 to 2006. Professor Kitch specializes in feminist theory and epistemology, theories of transdisciplinarity, gender representation in visual and narrative culture and the material effects of such representation on the lived realities of diverse women’s lives. She has written three books on feminism and utopianism and developed that as a sub-field of feminist theory. Her most recent book on that topic is "Higher Ground: From Utopianism to Realism in American Feminist Thought and Theory" (University of Chicago Press, 2000). Other books (which have won national prizes) include "Chaste Liberation: Celibacy and Female Cultural Status" (University of Illinois Press, 1989) and "This Strange Society of Women: Reading the Letters and Lives of the Woman’s Commonwealth" (Ohio State University Press, 1993).
Ann Hibner Koblitz
Professor of Women and Gender Studies
koblitz@asu.edu | Curriculum Vitae (PDF)
Although Ann Hibner Koblitz’s research interests have changed considerably since she received her PhD in Russian Intellectual History from Boston University in 1983, they still generally revolve around the relationships of gender with science, technology (broadly defined) and medicine. Her first two books, A Convergence of Lives. Sofia Kovalevskaia: Scientist, Writer, Revolutionary and Science, Women and Revolution in Russia examined the lives of 19th-century Russian women scientists and mathematicians and explored the significance of their stories for feminist gender and science theory. Koblitz has also written several dozen research articles on Russian women in science, gender and science theory, gender and archaeology, and comparative aspects of women/ gender in science, technology and medicine (with special emphasis on the situations of women in Asia, Africa and Latin America). Her current book project, Sex and Herbs and Birth Control (University of Michigan Press, in press), is a cross-cultural examination of fertility control methods, meanings of pregnancy/abortion, demographers’ narratives about reproduction, and degradation of contraceptive knowledge.
Karen J. Leong
Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies
Director of Asian Pacific American Studies
karen.leong@asu.edu
In all aspects of her scholarship—research, teaching, and community engagement—Karen Leong explores the overlapping and mutually reinforcing discourses of gender, race, class and nation, and how these discourses have advantaged some and disadvantaged others in United States society. Her teaching and research focus is on United States cultural and social history with an emphasis on women’s experiences, the development and shifting of gender ideologies, racial identity formation, immigration policy and the formation of national identities. Leong's book, "The China Mystique: Pearl S. Buck, Anna May Wong, Mayling Soong Chiang and the Transformation of American Orientalism," was published by the University of California Press in Spring 2005. She is currently working with Japanese American Citizens League: Arizona and members of the Japanese American community on an oral history project about Japanese Americans in Arizona.
Mary Logan Rothschild
Professor Emerita of Women and Gender Studies and History
mary.rothschild@asu.edu
Mary Logan Rothschild specializes in the history of American women and feminism, women’s oral history and gender equity in education. In her teaching, she inspires students to critically evaluate the past with empathy and care. All of her teaching uses gender as a primary lens to analyze society and to understand the intersection of race and class in American society. She has written "A Case of Black and White: Northern Volunteers and the Southern Freedom Summers, 1964-1965" and "Doing What the Day Brought: An Oral History of Arizona Women." Currently Rothschild is working on two research projects: "Girl Scouting and the Culture of American Womanhood, 1912-1982," which uses Girl Scouting as a window on American girlhood and womanhood in the Twentieth Century, and "Living U.S. Women’s History: Voices from the Field," which is an oral history project on the founding of the field of U.S. women’s history and a rich collection of fifty extensive interviews. Teaching at all levels is her passion and she has been awarded the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Dean’s Quality Teaching Award, the ASU Alumni Association Faculty Achievement Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Arizona Humanities Council’s Scholar of the Year Award.
Rose Weitz
Professor of Women and Gender Studies and Sociology
rose.weitz@asu.edu | Curriculum Vitae (PDF)
Rose Weitz' research and teaching center on women, health and the body. My most recent research is on midlife women's sexuality and its portrayal in the media. As a sociologist, I am particularly interested in the interrelationship between power, on the one hand, and stigma, identity, health or illness, and healthcare, on the other. My most recent book is "Rapunzel’s Daughters: What Women’s Hair Tells Us About Women’s Lives" (published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004). I am also author of "Life with AIDS" (Rutgers, 1991) and of "The Sociology of Health, Illness, and Health Care: A Critical Approach" (Wadsworth, 1996, 2001, 2004), co-author of "Labor Pains: Modern Midwives and Home Birth" (Yale University Press, 1988), and editor of "The Politics of Women’s Bodies: Appearance, Sexuality, and Behavior" (Oxford University Press, 1998).
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Michelle McGibbney Vlahoulis
Lecturer in Women and Gender Studies
michelle.mcgibbney@asu.edu
Michelle McGibbney Vlahoulis' areas of teaching and research include feminist film criticism, women and popular culture, body image and social change. She is particularly interested in the ways in which representations of women in the popular discourse affect the lives of real women and their bodies and look for ways to combat these images or alternative forms of media that can help provide social change. Vlahoulis teaches courses on women and society, women and popular culture, women and film and women and social change. She received the Student Affairs Tribute to Faculty and Academic Professionals and the Commission on the Status of Women for Outstanding Group Award along with the ASU Body Pride Committee and has been nominated for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Excellence in Advising Award.
