Allison Pugh is Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality at the University of Virginia. Her research and teaching focus on how economic trends – from commodification to job insecurity to automation – shape the way people forge connections and find meaning and dignity at home and at work.
Sarah L. Orsak is a feminist disability scholar. Her work is broadly concerned with the imbrications of disability, race, gender, and nation in the United States, specifically focalizing the relationship between disability and Blackness through literary and cultural analysis. Trained in Gender Studies, Orsak connects Black feminist thought and critical disability studies.
Isabel Felix Gonzales is an Assistant Professor, General Faculty in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality.
Maryam Zehtabi has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and a graduate certificate in Film Studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her recent research has focused on the ramifications of sex work in Iran from the Constitutional Revolution of early twentieth century to the present day through the lens of Persian literature and film. She is particularly interested in women, gender, and sexuality studies and the intersection of religion and feminism. Her current research centers around the issues of child marriage and the #MeToo Movement in Iran.
Professor King’s work is animated by abolitionist and decolonial traditions within Black Studies and Native/Indigenous Studies. She is the author of The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Duke University Press, 2020) which won the Lora Romero First Book Prize. She also co-edited Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler Colonialism and Anti-Black Racism (Duke University Press, 2021).
Matthew Chin is anthropologist that carries out feminist and queer histories of race to engage contemporary problem spaces at the intersection of geographies and fields.
Denise Walsh (PhD New School for Social Research) is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Politics and Women, Gender & Sexuality at the University of Virginia. Her research investigates how democracies can be made more inclusive and just. Walsh's current book project, Culture and Women's Rights Don't Clash, focuses on the so-called "burka ban" in France, the legalization of polygyny in South Africa, and the marrying out rule for Indigenous women in Canada.
Lisa Speidel is an Associate Professor, General Faculty and is also a Certified Sexuality Educator (CSE) through the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists (AASECT). Lisa teaches Human Sexualities, Men and Masculinities, Gender Based Violence, Pleasure Activism, Power and Race in Gender and Sexuality Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies.
Farzaneh Milani completed her graduate studies in Comparative Literature in 1979 at the University of California in Los Angeles. Her dissertation, “Forugh Farrokhzad: A Feminist Perspective” was a critical study of the poetry of a pioneering Iranian poet. A past president of the Association of Middle Eastern Women Studies in America, Milani was the recipient of All University Teaching Award in 1998 and nominated for Virginia Faculty of the Year in 1999.
Meyer, Doug. 2022. Violent Differences: The Importance of Race in Sexual Assault against Queer Men. Oakland: University of California Press.
Meyer, Doug. 2015. Violence against Queer People: Race, Class, Gender, and the Persistence of Anti-LGBT Discrimination. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
