WGSS - Key Persons

Job Titles:

• Aisha Finch Associate Professor - WGSS, on Leave for the 2024 - 2025 Academic Year
• Associate Professor - WGSS, on Leave for the 2024 - 2025 Academic Year
• Associate Professor of Women

Aisha Finch is an Associate Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. A formally trained scholar of the African Diaspora, her research focuses on the study of slavery in Cuba and the Atlantic World, transnational Black feminism, and Black political movements and social life in the Caribbean, Latin America, and the U.S. Broadly speaking, Prof. Finch's work explores the radical Black practices of freedom that disrupted slavery, colonialism, and patriarchy in nineteenth-century Cuba; the gendered analytics and feminist methodologies that have transformed studies of slavery; and the ways in which transnational genealogies of Black feminism engender alternative readings of colonial archives. She is the author of Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba: La Escalera and the Insurgencies of 1841-1844, which received the Harriet Tubman Book Prize from the Schomburg Center's Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery, and was a finalist for the Fredrick Douglass Book Prize. She is also the co-editor, with Fannie T. Rushing, of Breaking the Chains, Forging the Nation: The Afro-Cuban Fight for Freedom and Equality, 1812-1912. Finch's new research focuses on comparative histories of Black women and the sacred, arguing that Black women in the rural Caribbean and the U.S. South presented an insistent refusal to the violence of the plantation world, during and after slavery, through their knowledge and reimagination of the sacred. She has also begun work on an exploration of Black feminist intellectual thought in the Global Hispanophone, examining the ways in which activists and scholars in Latin America have redefined the boundaries of Black feminism through their critiques of coloniality and anti-Blackness.

Job Titles:

• Carla Freeman Director, Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry Goodrich C. White Professor
• Director, Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry
• Professor of Women

Carla Freeman is the Goodrich C. White Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and associated faculty in Anthropology and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Emory. She is currently the Interim Dean of Emory College of Arts and Sciences, having served as the College's Executive Associate Dean 2020-2022 and as the Senior Associate Dean of Faculty 2014-2020. Freeman earned her AB in Anthropology from Bryn Mawr College in 1983 and Ph.D. in Anthropology from Temple University in 1993. Freeman's research examines the culture, gender, and political economy of labor and globalization, the changing nature of work/life in the 20th and 21st centuries, and the growing role of affect and affective labor across market and non-market economies. A feminist anthropologist with over thirty years of fieldwork experience in the Caribbean, her publications include three books: High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy (Duke University Press, 2000), Entrepreneurial Selves (Duke University Press, 2014) and Global Middle Classes (with Rachel Heiman and Mark Liechty, SAR Press). She has published in such journals as American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, Feminist Anthropology, Signs: Journal of Women, Culture and Society, Feminist Studies, and Critique of Anthropology. Freeman's research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Fulbright, and the OAS. She is the past President of the Association for Feminist Anthropology and the editor (with Li Zhang, UC-Davis) of Oxford University Press' series of contemporary ethnography, "Issues of Globalization." For selected publications: http://emory.academia.edu/CarlaFreeman Video: "On Academic Failure" Interview about Entrepreneurial Selves.

Job Titles:

• Senior Associate
• Vice Dean of Faculty and Divisional Dean of Sciences

Deboleena Roy was appointed Senior Associate Dean for Faculty in Fall 2020. In 2024 she was promoted to Vice Dean of Faculty and Divisional Dean of Sciences. She is Professor of Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology (NBB) and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) at Emory.

Job Titles:

• Co - Chair of the Board of Directors for the Asian American Resource Workshop
• Postdoctoral Fellow
• Provost

Eleanor Craig researches gender, race, coloniality, and religion in literary and philosophical modes. They are interested in how critiques of these entangled dynamics take shape in Atlantic and transpacific frameworks. Craig is co-editor of Beyond Man: Race, Coloniality, and Philosophy of Religion (Duke UP, 2021) and special issues of Representations and Political Theology. Their first monograph, in progress, analyzes theories of trauma and racial melancholia with attention to their epistemological and religious dimensions. It examines constructions of the human, temporality, violence, and healing that appear in these theories and in experimental literary forms. Craig's second book project is on Asian American poets' portrayals of religion as both upholding and challenging racial, gendered, and colonialist structures. In the American Academy of Religion, Craig is on steering committees for the units on Religion, Colonialism, and Postcolonialism, and Theology and Religious Reflection. They also serve on the Committee on the Status of Women and Gender Minoritized Persons in the Profession. Craig is co-chair of the board of directors for the Asian American Resource Workshop where they have been a board member since 2022 and political education trainer since 2016. They are co-lead for the Critical Ethnic Studies Northeast working group grant from the Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative. Prior to joining Emory, Craig was Program Director and Lecturer in the Committee on Ethnicity, Migration, Rights at Harvard University, and affiliate faculty with Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. They were a consultant for the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning and led seminars on critical pedagogies. They were a member of the Political Theology Network Emerging Scholars cohort.

Job Titles:

• Director of Undergraduate Studies - WGSS / Candler Library
• Elizabeth Wilson Director of Undergraduate Studies - WGSS Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor - WGSS
• Professor
• Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor

Elizabeth A. Wilson is a Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor in the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She earned her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Sydney, and her B.Sc. (Hons) in Psychology from the University of Otago. She was an Australian Research Council Fellow at the University of New South Wales prior to coming to Emory, and she has also held appointments at the Australian National University and the University of Sydney. She has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2003-2004), the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard (2011-2012), the Council of Humanities, Princeton University (Fall 2019), and Emory's Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry (2023-2024). Professor Wilson is currently undertaking archival research on Valerie Solanas and the politics of anger and pathology in feminist theory: Corroded with SCUM: Valerie Solanas and Negative States of Mind. She is editing a volume of Solanas's letters for Duke University Press.

Job Titles:

• Department Chair - WGSS / Candler Library
• Falguni Sheth Department Chair - WGSS Professor - WGSS
• Professor of Women

Falguni A. Sheth is Professor of Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies. She holds a degree in Philosophy. She has published articles on race, hybrid identities, culturally sanctioned violence against immigrants and populations of color, and on the methods by which the state legally establishes the persecution of Muslim women and other women of color. She has also published several books, including Toward a Political Philosophy of Race (SUNY Press, 2009), which considers how racial divisions preserve state power. Her latest book, Unruly Women: Race, Neoliberalism, and the Hijab (Oxford University Press forthcoming 2021) explores the racial dynamics of juridical discourses that discipline Black Muslim and Muslim women of color in the United States. Sheth's areas of teaching and research include postcolonial theory, transnational feminist studies, critical philosophy of race and race studies, feminist political theory, anticolonial and empire studies, and political and legal philosophy. Sheth's research explores the intersections of violence, security, and political ontology as these lead to technologies of race and racialization as a strategy of political and social management of various populations. Tackling these issues requires the integration of the philosophy of race, critical race theory, postcolonial feminist theory, and political philosophy to expand the scope of feminist theory to include "feminist security studies of race." By illuminating how the legacies of war, violence, and colonialism are transformed via law, public policies, and cultural institutions to appear neutral, just, and liberal-democratic, her work reveals the mechanisms by which legal and cultural institutions work to maintain a veneer of security on behalf of their dominant populations.

Job Titles:

• Associate Professor - WGSS, on Leave for the 2024 - 2025 Academic Year
• Associate Professor of Women

Kadji Amin is a 2023-4 Fellow at the Cornell Society for the Humanities. He is on leave for the 2024- 2025 academic year. Kadji Amin is Associate Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. He is the recipient of a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in "Sex" from the University of Pennsylvania Humanities Forum (2015-16) and a Humanities Institute Faculty Fellowship from Stony Brook University (2015). Amin's research and teaching focuses on bringing empirical scholarship on queer and trans history and on gender and sexual variance in the Global South to bear on queer and trans theory. His book, Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History (Duke 2017) won an Honorable Mention for best book in LGBT studies form the GL/Q Caucus of the Modern Language Association. Disturbing Attachments deidealizes Jean Genet's coalitional politics with the Black Panthers and the Palestinians by foregrounding their animation by unsavory and outdated modes of attachment, including pederasty, racial fetishism, nostalgia for prison, and fantasies of queer terrorism. Amin is currently at work on a second book project, tentatively titled Trans Materialism without Gender Identity. Trans Materialism without Gender Identity rethinks the foundations of contemporary transgender politics and scholarship by arguing that the concept of gender identity is a fiction that has historically done transgender people more harm than good. It demonstrates that, both historically and globally, gender identity structurally abandons those transfeminine people whose cultures are too public, too sexual, irreducibly social, and too shaped by the exigencies of labor to be privatized as individual identities. Trans Materialism outlines a materialist transgender theory and politics that robustly opposes the harms faced by the most vulnerable transgender populations, trans women and femmes of color. Amin has published articles in journals including TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, Social Text, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, and Representations. He is the coeditor, with Amber Jamilla Musser and Roy Pérez, of a special issue of ASAP/Journal on "Queer Form." He serves on the Editorial Board for TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly and Gender and Women's Studies and is the State of the Field Review Editor for GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.

Job Titles:

• Assistant Professor

Job Titles:

• Emeritus Professor
• Michael Moon Emeritus Professor
• Professor of Women

Michael Moon is an Emeritus Professor of Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies. He holds a B.A. from Columbia University and a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins, and has taught at Duke (1987-98), Johns Hopkins (1998-2006), and Emory (since 2006). He is the author of Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in Leaves of Grass (1991), A Small Boy and Others: Imitation and Initiation in American Culture from Henry James to Andy Warhol (1998), and Darger's Resources (2012), and is the editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Leaves of Grass. A former editor of the journals American Literature and ELH, he has published widely, in venues ranging from October, Representations, and GLQ to Southern Spaces and Guttergeek, an on-line review of graphic narrative. A former co-chair of the LGBT Caucus of the Modern Language Association and former chair of the English Institute, he was once Director of Studies in Sexualities at Emory (http://sexualities.emory.edu/). Moon taught some of the earliest university courses on gay & lesbian literature and, a few years later, with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, on queer theory. His current teaching focuses on questions about embodiment, writing, media, and the movement of texts across media. In addition to LGBT studies and queer theory, Moon's research concerns modern literature, literary theory, media and mass culture, with a particular emphasis on the cultural production of "outsider" communities. He is currently at work on a study of the Arabian Nights in late twentieth-century avant-garde and mass cultures, especially in the work of Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Job Titles:

• Norma Schweizer Senior Graduate Academic Program Coordinator
• Senior Graduate Academic Program Coordinator / Candler Library

Norma grew up in Parral, Chihuahua, Mexico, one of the "top ten gastronomic marvels" of the country, and internationally known for its delicious dulce de leche candy. She earned her BS in Computer Science and Computer Engineering from Universidad Autonoma de Cd. Juarez and her Master of Science from Colorado Technical University. Before joining the Graduate Program at Emory's Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department, Norma spent nine months working in the Office of Admissions and Financial Aid at the Candler School of Theology. Prior to that, she acted as the interim Graduate Program coordinator for WGSS and served as Assistant Director of Student Affairs for the Goizueta Business School's MBA For Working Professionals Programs. Norma and her family have lived in Colorado, Texas, Massachusetts, and, of course, Atlanta. She and her husband are the proud parents of a daughter who has earned three Emory degrees at Emory, and a son who attends the University of New England pursuing a Sports Management Degree Outside of work, she enjoys trying new recipes, listening to music, theater, and traveling to visit loved ones in the U.S. and Mexico.

Job Titles:

• Director of Graduate Studies
• Pamela Scully Director of Graduate Studies - WGSS Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor - WGSS and African Studies Advisor to the Provost
• Professor of Women

Pamela Scully is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and African Studies at Emory University. She has her Ph.D. in history from the University of Michigan. Professor Scully's research interests focus on gender history. She is currently engaged in research for a history of transnational feminist efforts to address sexual violence in conflict. Her most recent book is Writing Transnational History co-authored with Professor Fiona Paisley (Bloomsbury Academic UK 2019). Other books include Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (Ohio University Press, 2016); Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography, co-authored with Clifton Crais (Princeton, 2009, 2010); Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World (Duke University Press 2005), co-edited with Diana Paton, and Liberating the Family? Gender and British Slave Emancipation in the Rural Western Cape, South Africa, 1823-1853 (Heinemann, James Currey and David Philip, 1997). She is also the author of the AHA pamphlet, Race and Ethnicity in Women's and Gender History in Global Perspective (2006), and many articles and chapters. Professor Scully is past-president of the Association for Undergraduate Education at Research Universities, and a member of the editorial board of the Oxford Encyclopedia of African Women's History and of The Journal of Southern African Studies. She is on the advisory board of Social Dynamics. She is co-convener of the Coursera online course Understanding Violence and the Journeys to Education Teach-Out, focusing on diverse experiences of education, including that of First-Generation students. She has served as Vice Provost for Undergraduate Affairs at Emory, and as Deputy Editor of the Women's History Review and as Treasurer and Secretary of the International Federation for Research in Women's History. Research Gender History| Biography| Sexual Violence in Conflict and Gender Justice Videos Gender and Ebola, as part of the Spring 2015 Emory Ebola Faculty and Community Forum Professor Scully co-organized Why graduate school at Emory? Recent Publications Writing Transnational History (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/writing-transnational-history-9781474263986/ Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (Ohio University Press 2016) "Ebola and Post-Conflict Gender Justice: Lessons from Liberia" in Rita Shackel and Lucy Fiske, eds. Rethinking Transitional Gender Justice: Transformative Approaches in Post-Conflict Settings (Gender, Development and Social Change) 1st ed. 2019 Edition

Job Titles:

• Visiting Assistant Professor - WGSS / Candler Library

Job Titles:

• Associate Professor - WGSS, on Leave for the Spring 2025 Semester
• Associate Professor of Women
• Founding Co - Editor of Feminist Anthropology
• Sameena Mulla Associate Professor - WGSS, on Leave for the Spring 2025 Semester

Sameena Mulla is an Associate Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. She uses anthropological approaches to examine the intersections of law and health-care in U.S. interventions into sexual violence, and the ways in which they are invested in regimes of gender, race, and power. In particular, her research maintains a focus on the ways in which healthcare, law, and policing configure sexual violence as a social and political wound. Her first book, The Violence of Care: Rape Victims, Forensic Nurses and Sexual Assault Examination (New York University Press, 2014), is a study of emergency-room-based sexual assault intervention in Baltimore, Maryland, showing how therapeutic projects and investigative goals are conflated and complicated in forensic nursing examinations. Her second book, a collaborative ethnography with Heather Hlavka, Bodies in Evidence: Race, Gender, Science and Sexual Assault Adjudication (New York University Press, 2021) follows the evidence collected during forensic examinations to stages of adjudication, this time in a Milwaukee, Wisconsin felony court. The book argues that while questions of justice are often left unresolved in the courts, the science of the courts contributes to collective investments in and material production of gender, sexuality, and racial hierarchy. She has also written articles that were published in journals such as Medical Anthropology, Law and Society Review, and Gender and Society. Ethnographic and feminist research methodology, and collaborative research in particular, are other areas of her scholarly and pedagogical interest. With Dána-Ain Davis, Mulla is the founding co-editor of Feminist Anthropology, the official journal of the Association of Feminist Anthropology, and one of the academic editors of the Cornell University Press series Police/Worlds: Studies in Policing, Crime, and Governance. Her current fieldwork on civilian oversight of policing and its varying approaches to racialized police brutality is supported by a 3-year grant from the National Science Foundation, and is a collaboration with Ramona Pérez and Kevin Karpiak including ethnographic research across three different U.S. counties. In addition to her work on the intertwining and frictions between state-sanctioned forms of civilian oversight and community-driven interventions based in abolitionist social movements, she is also writing and thinking about punishment, surveillance, and disciplining in sex offender sentencing hearings. In particular, she considers the ways in which sentencing hearings deploy sensory regimes that stratify the forms of social life, sexuality, and care valued by the state, especially those ways that pathologize and dismiss what the court perceives as Black forms of kinship, community, and sociality.

Job Titles:

• Sandra Duplessis Senior Academic Department Administrator
• Senior Academic Department Administrator
• Senior Academic Department Administrator / Candler Library

Sandra Duplessis is the Senior Academic Department Administrator in WGSS. Prior to joining Emory University, she worked at Georgia Institute of Technology in Institute Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion where she served as Assistant Director for Administrative Operations, managing multiple projects focused on inclusive excellence. She also worked in the Office of the Provost at Georgia Tech where she provided executive level advisement to the Senior Vice Provost in Undergraduate Studies and Academic Affairs. Sandra received her Bachelor of Applied Science (BAS) degree in Administrative Management from Clayton State University in Morrow, Georgia and her Masters in Higher Education Administration from Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, Georgia. Sandra received special recognition for organizing the Director of Undergraduate Education Search at Georgia Tech. She is inspired daily by her three sons. In her free time, she enjoys writing short stories, jogging, and travelling.

Job Titles:

• Assistant Professor
• Shanya Cordis Assistant Professor

Shanya Cordis (she/her) is a first-generation Black and Indigenous (Lokono and Warrau) Guyanese American. As a sociocultural anthropologist, she specializes in African & African Diaspora Studies and Native American & Indigenous Studies. Broadly speaking, her research focuses on indigeneity and antiblackness across the Americas and the Caribbean, black and indigenous political subjectivities and resistance, transnational black and indigenous feminisms, and black feminist geographies. Her work examines how colonial and imperial legacies mediate and form the grounds of black and indigenous unfreedoms and liberatory struggles. Her forthcoming manuscript, Unsettling Geographies: Antiblackness, Gendered Violence, and Indigenous Dispossession in Guyana is a critical feminist ethnography that tracks how geographies of racial difference undergird indigenous recognition policies, extractive economies, and neocolonial capitalism, advancing the annexation of indigenous territories and entrenching antiblack logics. Secondly, Unsettling Geographies introduces relational difference, a theoretical framework which captures the social and political entanglements of the afterlives of slavery, conquest, and indentureship and its constitutively gendered and sexualized nature. Through an intersectional analysis of the racial and sexual imaginaries of the body-namely African, Amerindian, and Indian women- this book also traces how gendered violence is relationally configured and central to colonial capitalist expansion disrupting narratives that depict structural forces of dispossession as merely postcolonial remnants or endemic nationalistic struggles. Her second co-edited and co-authored book, Fugitive Anthropology (forthcoming Fall 2025) examines the embodied limits and generative openings that arise from conducting activist ethnographic research in contexts of colonialism, war and conflict, and racial and gendered violence, particularly for racialized queer, trans and gender expansive researchers. In addition to her research, Dr. Cordis is deeply invested in cultivating collaborative black and indigenous feminist praxis, both in and out of the classroom, to generate more expansive visions of black and indigenous liberation and autonomy. Critical black and indigenous feminisms offer a vital way to analyze movement(s) toward more transformative and decolonial futures, emphasizing how multiple axis of power cisheteropatriarchy, racism, capitalism, and colonialism - work together to structure our societies. In alignment with engaged feminist pedagogy, her research extends to public scholarship engagement, poetry, and creative mediums, with for example, the publication of her co-authored book, Say, Listen: Writing as Care (2023), as a member of the Black|Indigenous 100s Collective, a collective of black and indigenous scholars, artists, and organizers. The book foregrounds the relationship between writing and the body, and how we conceive living in the wake of ongoing global pandemics, anti-Blackness, and Indigenous erasure. As part of her teaching practice, she aims to incorporate teaching methods that cohere theory and praxis and bring the insights of interdisciplinary anthropological research to students' embodied lived experience. The classroom, beyond being a site of institutional socialization, is as a space for liberatory transformation, challenging students to not only be cognizant of why social inequities persist, but also to imagine and create pathways toward addressing them in their respective avenues of study/interest. Before arriving at Emory, Cordis taught at Columbia University, Spelman College, and the University of Texas at Austin. Education PhD, MA Sociocultural Anthropology, concentrations in African & African Diaspora Studies and Native American & Indigenous Studies, University of Texas at Austin Courses Taught Black Feminist Geographies (Fall 2024) Indigeneity of the South: Sovereignty, Colonialism, and Empire (Spring 2025) Caribbean Hauntings: From Conquest to New Grammars (Spring 2025) Publications Say, Listen: Writing as Care, Black|Indigenous 100s Collective, NP Press, 2023. "A Poetics of Living Rebellion: Sociocultural Anthropology in 2021." Co-authored with Sarah Ihmoud. American Anthropologist 124 (December 2022): 813-829. "Settler Unfreedoms."American Indian Culture and Research Journal. Special Issue: Blackness and Indigeneity, 43(2)(2019): 9-23. "Forging Relational Difference: Racial Gendered Violence and Dispossession in Guyana."Small Axe 60 (November 2019). "Push Ya Body: Imaginaries of the ‘Bush' and the Amerindian Body in the Guyanese State," In Unmasking the State: Politics, Society, and Economy in Guyana, 1992-2015 edited by Trotz, Alissa and Arif Bulkan. Ian Randle Publishers, 2019. Berry, Maya, Claudia Chávez, Shanya Cordis, Sarah Ihmoud, and Elizabeth Ruth Velasquez "Toward a Fugitive Anthropology: Gender, Race, and Violence in the Field."Cultural Anthropology Journal, 32(4) November 2017. "Frontier Imaginaries: Oil, Discovery, and Dispossession in Guyana," NACLA, Fall 2021, Vol. 53(1).

Job Titles:

• Spenser Feller Visiting Assistant Professor
• Visiting Assistant Professor / Candler Library

Spenser Shelley Feller is a poet and figure skater from the Midwest. Their research and teaching interests include Queer Studies, Transgender Studies, Feminist Theory, Critical Race Studies, psychoanalysis, histories of queerly gendered and trans erotic print culture, creative writing, and modern and contemporary American poetry. His dissertation examines how the pornographic figure of the sissy haunts feminism and trans-feminine cultural production in order to intervene into broader conversations around gender identity and sex panics. Their debut poetry collection, Dream Boat, won the Editor's Choice Award at Cleveland State University Poetry Center. In 2021, they were nominated for a Georgia Author of the Year Award.

Job Titles:

• Program Coordinator for the Department of Women
• Undergraduate Academic Program Coordinator / Candler Library
• Undergraduate Program Coordinator / Candler Library
• William Smith Undergraduate Program Coordinator

William Smith (he/ him) is the Undergraduate Program Coordinator for the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Prior to joining WGSS, Will received his Master of Divinity from Emory University's Candler School of Theology, where he enjoyed his time both studying and working for Candler's Office of Student Life and Office of Worship and Spiritual Formation. Before coming to Emory, Will received his BA in Religion from the University of Georgia. When not at work, Will enjoys spending time with his loved ones, including his cat, Paris H. Basil. Drawing, taking walks, watching movies, and listening to music are some of his favorite things.