WGSS - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Business Operations Manager
Job Titles:
- Moritz College of Law, Assistant Professor
- Professor
Professor Akbar received her B.A. from Barnard College, Columbia University, and her J.D. from the University of Michigan, where she served as editor-in-chief of the Michigan Law Review. After law school, she clerked for Judge Gerard E. Lynch in the U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York.
She spent two years as a staff attorney with the Queens Legal Service Corp., part of Legal Services NYC, in a community-based battered women's legal services project. Then, she taught for three years as a clinical fellow with the International Human Rights Clinic at New York University, and one year at City University of New York Law School in the CLEAR (Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility) project, a cross-clinical collaboration between the Immigrant & Refugee Rights Clinic and the Defenders Clinic.
Her interdisciplinary research focuses on the intersections of national security and criminal law, and on the functioning of the contemporary punitive state. She has written extensively on the role of counter-radicalization in shaping national security policing and prosecutions. Underlying her research is an effort to understand the relationships between law and legal discourse, policing, and inequality.
Her clinical practice is focused on law and organizing for marginalized communities. With her students, she has litigated in state, federal, and transnational forums against domestic and foreign governments for human and civil rights abuses, researched and written community-based human rights reports, and collaborated with community organizations in campaigns for public education and collective change.
Professor Akbar's work has been published in the UCLA Law Review, UC Irvine Law Review, the Journal of Legal Education, the Nation, and more. She serves on the board of the Clinical Law Review.
Job Titles:
- Provost 's Fellow ( Assistant Professor, Autumn 2024 )
Bayan Abusneineh is a Provost's Fellow in the Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies. As a member of inaugural Provost's Fellow to Faculty program, she will become an Assistant Professor in the department in Autumn 2024.
Job Titles:
- Senior Vice Provost for Student Academic Excellence and Professor
Charlene Gilbert joined the Office of Academic Affairs on April 4, 2022 as the new Senior Vice Provost for Student Academic Excellence. Gilbert serves as a strategic advisor to the Executive Vice President and Provost of the University and provides leadership, vision, and strategic direction for a team to advance the student academic experience for Ohio State's 65,000 students. Her team includes the Vice Provost and Dean of Undergraduate Education, the Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School, the Vice Provost for Strategic Enrollment and the Vice Provost for Academic Programs.
Prior to joining OSU Gilbert served as the Dean of the College of Arts and Letters at the University of Toledo from 2017 to 2022. During her tenure the College made significant advances in first-year retention rates, six-year graduation rates, undergraduate research, graduate program rankings and external research funding. In addition, Gilbert initiated several high-impact programs including a College Scholars program, a major in Data Analytics, and secured a major gift to support a new Global Scholars program aimed at ensuring every student would have access to a study abroad experience.
Nurturing a high-quality student academic experience has been one of Gilbert's highest priorities throughout her career with a particular focus on student success outcomes. From August 2014 to July 2017, Gilbert served as the dean and director of Ohio State Lima and was a professor in the Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Ohio State. During her tenure, compared to the prior six years, the campus saw its first increase in enrollment, had its highest first-year retention rates, and had an increase in both the four-year and five-year graduation rates. In addition, Ohio State Lima had the largest increase in the percentage of underrepresented minority students in the history of the campus and the highest average ACT score for the entering class in the prior six years.
Job Titles:
- Chairman of Committee
- Chairman, Year 1 )
- Professor
Job Titles:
- Divisional Dean, Arts and Humanities
Danielle Fosler-Lussier has taught at The Ohio State University School of Music since 2003. Educated at the University of Pennsylvania (BA), the University of Hamburg (DAAD scholar), and the University of California, Berkeley (MA, PhD), she spent three years as a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University's Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts before coming to Ohio.
Her research on music and Cold War politics in Eastern and Western Europe and the United States has been supported by an AMS-50 dissertation fellowship as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the International Research and Exchanges Board, the Eisenhower Foundation, and the Mershon Center for International Security Studies.
Fosler-Lussier is the author of two books: Music Divided: Bartók's Legacy in Cold War Culture (University of California Press, 2007); and Music in America's Cold War Diplomacy (University of California Press, 2015). The latter book is accompanied by an online database of U.S. cultural presentations from the 1950s to the 1980s.
Fosler-Lussier's other publications about U.S. government sponsorship for musical performances include "Music Pushed, Music Pulled: Cultural Diplomacy, Globalization, and Imperialism," Diplomatic History 36, no. 1 (January 2012): 53-64; "Cultural Diplomacy as Cultural Globalization: The University of Michigan Jazz Band in Latin America," Journal of the Society for American Music 4, no. 1 (February 2010): 59-93; and "American Cultural Diplomacy and the Mediation of Avant-garde Music," Robert Adlington, ed., Sound Commitments: Avant-garde Music and the Sixties (Oxford University Press, 2009), 232-253.
Her teaching and research interests include music as a site of international contact and exchange; twentieth-century music; and the music of Joseph Haydn.
Job Titles:
- Dean, College of Arts and Sciences
Job Titles:
- Professor Emerita, Department of Arts Administration, Education and Policy
Job Titles:
- Director of External Affairs at Equitas Health
Areas of Expertise
Women's movements and feminisms in post-Soviet countries
Job Titles:
- Lecturer
- ESC 's Regional School Improvement Coordinator
Dr. Sierra J. Austin-King serves as the ESC's Regional School Improvement Coordinator for Equity and Diversity and as a lecturer for the Departments of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies and African American and African Studies at Ohio State. Dr. Austin-King is a WGSS graduate, with a focus on race and social justice. She also graduated with an interdisciplinary specialization in Latino/a Studies. Dr. Austin-King's research, activism and work focuses on education equity and prioritizes operationalizing intersectional approaches to social change.
Her most recent publication will appear in Films for the Feminist Classroom (2022), with others in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society and Frontiers: A Journal of Women's, Studies. Dr. Austin-King is the recipient of several grants awarded by the National Women's Studies Association, OSU's Department of Women's and Gender Studies, the Office of Diversity & Inclusion, the University of Texas at San Antonio, Columbus College of Art & Design, and the ESC of Central Ohio. She has presented original research both domestically and abroad, including in Spain and various parts of the UK. She has also served as an adjunct faculty member at Columbus College of Art & Design, where she designed the institution's first faculty DEI professional development course.
Dr. Austin-King has been recognized as a Leadership Ohio Ambassador (2021), a YWCA Columbus Sue Doody Alumni of the Year (2020), and a JPMorgan Chase & Deloitte Wise Women Rising Star (2019). She currently serves as board member and grants committee chair of the Women's Fund of Central Ohio, as a member of the Franklin University School of Education Advisory Board, and a member of the YWCA Columbus Alumni Committee. She is also a proud member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Incorporated.
Job Titles:
- Department of Teaching and Learning
Job Titles:
- Department of Anthropology
Job Titles:
- Education Specialist
- Senior Advisor for International Affairs
Esther Gottlieb is an international education specialist involved in implementing and evaluating education plans. At Ohio State she has worked with faculty on interdisciplinary research on international themes and with education outreach and program evaluation for the area study centers. Her experience with teacher education reform and training educators has spanned from the Kibbutzim College of Education in Tel Aviv to the Ohio Global Institute, a multi-university, multi-organization collaborative that trains educators in internationalizing across the curriculum.
Gottlieb teaches comparative school systems, globalization and education, and education for development. Recently she has been involved in policy research on double university degrees, evaluating students' global competencies, and internationalizing the student learning experience, in the Colleges of Engineering, Social Work, and Public Health at Ohio State. She is currently collaborating on the creation of the Peace Education and Training Repository (PETR).
Her research centers on the discursive practices of education and on the analysis of reforms and polices. Among her publications are Identity Conflicts: Can Violence be Regulated? (ed. with J. Craig Jenkins); Education and Social Change in Korea, with Don Adams; "Making Education World-Class: 'ThinkGlobalOhio,'" in Prospects; "Are We Postmodern Yet? Historical and Theoretical Explorations in Comparative Education," in International Companion to Education; "Appalachian Self-Fashioning: Regional identities and Cultural Models," in Discourse; "Global Rhetoric, Local Policy: Teacher Training Reform in Israeli Education," in Educational Policy; and "The Discursive Construction of Knowledge: The Case of Radical Education Discourse," in Quantitative Studies in Education.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Committee
- Member of the Queer & Trans Studies Search Committee
- Director of Grad Studies, Year 1 )
- Member of Committee
- Professor
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Committee
- Member of the Queer & Trans Studies Search Committee
- Staff Assistant
- Member of Committee
- Staff
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Instructor
- Member of the Indigenous Feminisms Search Committee
- Associate Professor of Women
- Member of Committee
Jessica Delgado is an Associate Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and History. She earned her Ph.D. in Latin American History at the University of California at Berkeley in 2009 and taught at Princeton University in the religion Department from 2009-2019. Her primary areas of teaching and research are the histories of women, gender, sexuality, religion, and race in Latin America-particularly in Mexico in the 16 th, 17 th, and 18 th centuries. Other areas of particular interest include: colonial Catholicism; gender, race, caste, and religion in the early modern Atlantic World; the materiality of devotion; the relationship between religiosity and people's experiences of the physical world and embodiment; and the intersection between social and spiritual status. Her first book, Troubling Devotion: Laywomen and the Church in Colonial Mexico, 1630-1770, looks at the ways laywomen's religiosity and daily interactions with religious authorities, institutions, symbols, and ideas shaped the devotional landscape of colonial Mexico. Her current book project is called The Beata of the Black Habit: Race, Sexuality, and Religious Authority in Late Colonial Mexico takes the life and trial of an unknown female mystic to explore changes in religious culture, colonial power, and racialized ideologies of gender and sexuality in late eighteenth-century Mexico.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Chairman of the Queer & Trans Studies Search Committee
- Chairman of Committee
- Chairman, Year 1 )
Jian Neo Chen is associate professor of queer studies in the departments of English and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Chen is affiliate faculty in the Film Studies program and a previous director of Asian American Studies (Autumn 2020) and Sexuality Studies (2017-2018) programs. Their research focuses on transgender and queer aesthetics and embodied practices in literature, visual culture and contemporary theory and their reimagining and reconstruction of social relations and movements. Their first book, Trans Exploits: Trans of Color Cultures and Technologies in Movement (Duke University Press, 2019), explores the displaced emergences of trans of color cultural expression and activism through performance, film/video, literature and digital media by the second decade of the twenty-first century, following fifty years of minimal civil rights reforms and renewed state and social technologies of racial gendering. Trans Exploits received the 2021 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award in Social Sciences and was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist in LGBTQ Studies in 2020. Chen is working on two new books. The first engages with lineages of Asian American and Asian diasporic queer and feminist thought to develop a racial trans/disciplinary methodology attuned to the literary and visual sensorium of Asian American trans and gender variant political experience. The second explores the potential autonomy of trans* literature within and outside the aesthetic, political, and scientific orders of US and Western European settler racial capitalism. Their research, teaching, writing and culture building seek resonances with movements for gender, sexual, indigenous and racial liberation across different sectors and territories of the transnational US empire.
Chen serves as a co-editor in the new ASTERISK book series at Duke University Press with Susan Stryker and Eliza Steinbock. They have been an editorial board member of the Transgender Studies Quarterly since 2015. Chen was an invited visiting scholar at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University in Spring 2012. Before joining Ohio State, they were assistant professor and postdoctoral fellow at the NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study from 2009 to 2011. Their curated transmedia projects have screened with the 6-8 Months Project, hosted by Kara Walker Studios in New York City; the New York MIX 24 Queer Experimental Film Festival; the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus and the NYU Asian/Pacific/ American Institute. Before graduate studies, Chen developed and organized a popular literacy, workplace rights program for Asian immigrant women working in informal garment, electronics, hotel and restaurant economies in Oakland, CA. They also produced community events and raised funds to counter state, public and interpersonal violence impacting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning communities in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Job Titles:
- Department of French and Italian, Assistant Professor
Job Titles:
- Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures
Joyce Chen is a development economist with research interests in migration, household bargaining and human capital. Her research program focuses on understanding migration choices and the impact of those choices on household decision-making and the intra-household allocation of resources.
Dr. Chen is on leave for the 2022-2023 academic year.
Job Titles:
- Senior Lecturer
- Senior Lecturer in the Department of Women
Julia M. Applegate is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University. Ms. Applegate is a skilled trainer and experienced presenter who has designed curricula, conducted Train the Trainer programs and presented at local, state, national and international conferences on public health, HIV/AIDS, gender and sexual orientation topics. Her trainings have focused on questions of health equity, diversity and inclusion-focusing primarily on marginalized and underserved communities. Ms. Applegate has worked on numerous federal grants and is experienced in grant writing and implementation. She has done policy and program development at the local, state and international level as a government employee and as a member of a Board of Directors. Ms. Applegate has 10 years of management experience as a public health professional.
Julia holds a Masters of Public Health and a Master of Arts in Women's, Sexuality and Gender Studies from The Ohio State University and has 25 years of teaching experience. She lives in the Glen Echo area of Clintonville with her partner, Liv Gjestvang, their two children, Karsten and Solveig.
Job Titles:
- Department of Comparative
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor, Chair of Department of History of Art
Kashif Dennis is a Ph.D. student at the Ohio State University in Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies. His research interests stem from his background as a visual artist, where he draws from the cultural festival of Trinidad Carnival as a socio-political and historical site for speculations on queer futurity. Dennis believes that the structure of the Carnival can be utilized as a model for investigations of futurity which cite the Caribbean's cultural, racial and sexual past, present and future through speculative storytelling.
Job Titles:
- Advisor
- Advisor for the Department of Women
Keara Henry (she/her) is the Academic Advisor for the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Keara holds a Master of Fine Art in Visual Art and her research interests include intersectionality in the arts, feminist discourse on identity and presentation, as well as broader questions of societal impact on expression.
In addition to WGSS, Keara is the Advisor for students majoring in African and African American Studies, Classics, and Philosophy. When she is not assisting students or colleagues, Keara can be found exploring allegedly haunted places with her best friend, rolling her sparkly dice while tabletop gaming, or ripping a painting into shreds to create something new.
Job Titles:
- Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Job Titles:
- Member of the Indigenous Feminisms Search Committee
- Chairman of Committee
- Chairman, Year 3
- Distinguished Professor
Job Titles:
- Professor and Chair of the Dept. of Ed. Stud, Department of Educational Studies
Job Titles:
- Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Luzmila Camacho-Platero has taught as Associate Professor in small liberal arts colleges (Utica College and Saint Mary's College) and has broad experience teaching a variety of courses ranging from language at all levels to literature and culture from Golden Age to 20th century. Her main research explores Golden Age Theater and more specifically the topic of la mujer varonil. Her other research and teaching interests include contemporary Spanish film and minority cultures. Currently, she is working on an anthology of Medieval and Golden Age Spanish women writers.
Job Titles:
- Chairman of the Indigenous Feminisms Search Committee
- Chairman of Committee
- Faculty Instructor
Job Titles:
- Associate Dean for Engagement
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Literature for Children and Young
- Department of Teaching and Learning, College of Education and Human Ecology, Associate Professor
Job Titles:
- Department of Teaching and Learning, College of Education and Human Ecology
- Professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning
Mollie Blackburn is a professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning in the College of Education and Human Ecology at the Ohio State University. Her research focuses on literacy, language, and social change, with particular attention to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ) youth and the teachers who serve them.
She has published in journals such as Reading Research Quarterly, Research in the Teaching of English, and Teachers College Record, among others. She is the author of Interrupting Hate: Homophobia in Schools and what Literacy Can Do About It and the co-editor of Acting Out!: Combating Homophobia through Teacher Activism, which received the Phillip C. Chinn Book Award, the Richard A. Meade Award, and the American Library Association's CHOICE Book Award.
She has received WILLA's (Women in Life and Literature Assembly of the National Council of Teachers of English) Inglis Award for her work in the areas of gender, sexuality, sexual orientation, and young people; the Queer Studies special interest group of the American Educational Research Association's award for a body of work; and the Alan C. Purves Award for an article in the Research in the Teaching of English deemed rich with implications for classroom practice.
Job Titles:
- Director
- Member of the Advisory Committee
- Member of Committee
Job Titles:
- Department of History of Art
Job Titles:
- Assistant Vice Provost, Office of Outreach and Engagement
Job Titles:
- Appalachian Student Scholarship
Job Titles:
- Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Theatre, Film, and Media Arts
Rasel Ahmed is a community-based filmmaker who uses traditional cinematic tropes and techniques to combine documentary with fantasy. Characters in his films function as an anchor to synthesize the iconography, visual metaphor, and psychogeography of cinematic spaces. Ahmed's experimental videos are a means to explore his dialogical relationship with displacement, citizenship, border, and loneliness. He uses a combination of participatory documentation, archival research, and collaborative re-enactment to finalize the performance and movement choices in the film. Ahmed has an MFA in Visual Arts with a concentration in Moving Image from Columbia University. He also runs a community-based transnational Queer archive and is the founder of Bangladesh's first LGBT magazine Roopbaan. He is the recipient of Freedom From Religion Foundation Award, Center Global Leadership Award, Atlas Corps Fellowship, Royal Commonwealth Society Associate Fellowship, Point Foundation Scholarship, GAAPA/Prism Foundation Scholarship, Davis-Putter Scholarship, Chinn Scholarship, Chowdhury Center Fellowship, Columbia University Visual Arts Scholarship, Swedish Institute Leadership Fellowship, and State Department's International Visitor Leadership Program.
Job Titles:
- Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Committee
- Member of the Indigenous Feminisms Search Committee
- Staff Assistant
- Member of Committee
- Staff
Professor Martha Chamallas is a leading scholar in a number of fields, including torts, employment discrimination law, and legal issues affecting women. She is the author of two books and more than 40 articles and essays in law journals such as the Michigan Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, UCLA Law Review and the Southern California Law Review. She is a member of the American Law Institute, Torts Consultative Group and has participated on Gender and Race Bias Task Forces for the states of Iowa and Pennysylvania.
Following graduation from law school, Professor Chamallas clerked for the Honorable Charles Clark of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and served as an attorney for the U.S. Department of Labor, Office of the Solicitor, Civil Rights Division.
Prior to joining the Moritz College of Law in 2002, Professor Chamallas served on the faculties of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, the Louisiana State University Law Center, and the University of Iowa College of Law. She has held distinguished visiting positions at the Washington University School of Law, Richmond School of Law, the University of Ghent, and Suffolk University School of Law. She also served as the chair of the Women's Studies Program at the University of Iowa.
At the Moritz College of Law, she teaches Torts, Employment Discrimination, and Gender and the Law. Professor Chamallas was the recipient of the University Distinguished Lecturer Award in 2006.
Robin Cremins is a queer and gender non-binary settler Ph.D. candidate and Graduate Teaching Associate in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the Ohio State University. After completing a B.A. in Religious Studies and a B.S. in Social Work from the University of Tennessee, they went on to complete an M.A. in Philosophy at The New School for Social Research with a minor in Gender and Sexuality Studies and a concentration in Psychoanalysis. Cremins' research specifically focuses on the complicities between settler colonialism and constructions of gender and sexuality. Their research genealogically interrogates how ostensibly universal discourses of gender and sexuality are constructed and employed to justify settler colonial and imperialist expansion narrated as progress.
Job Titles:
- Department of History, Professor and King George III Chair in British History
Sara M. Butler earned her honors B.A. in history from York University (1995), her M.A. from the University of Toronto (1996), and her Ph.D. from Dalhousie University (2001), where she worked with C.J. Neville. She spent twelve years at Loyola University New Orleans, attaining the rank of Gregory F. Curtin, S.J., Distinguished Professor and where she founded the Legal Studies interdisciplinary minor program and co-founded the History Pre-law major, before joining The Ohio State in autumn of 2016.
Sara's research publications lie in the social history of the law. She has authored three books: The Language of Abuse: Marital Violence in Later Medieval England (Brill, 2007), Divorce in Medieval England: From One to Two Persons at Law (Routledge, 2013), and Forensic Medicine and Death Investigation in Medieval England (Routledge, 2015), and co-edited a volume of articles with Wendy J. Turner, entitled Law and Medicine in the Middle Ages (Brill, 2014). She has also written on subjects such as suicide, abortion by assault, coverture, medical malpractice, and more recently on singlewomen. In 2007, Sara was awarded the Sutherland prize by the American Society for Legal History for her article, "Degrees of culpability: Suicide verdicts, mercy, and the jury in medieval England," (Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 36.2, 2006). Her most recent endeavor is an online blog entitled "A Legal History Miscellany," co-written with Katherine Watson (Oxford Brooke's University) and Krista J. Kesselring (Dalhousie University), with the goal of making England's early legal history accessible to a broader audience. Sara's teaching interests are in criminal law, medicine, Christianity, persecuted groups, and women.
Sara's interests outside the classroom involve reading Scandinavian murder mysteries, running and walking, travel in Europe, and hanging out with her family and two dogs (named for Vikings: Ragnar and Floki). As a recently naturalized citizenship, she is very much looking forward to voting in her first American election.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Committee
- Member of Committee
- Staff
Job Titles:
- Department of French and Italian
Job Titles:
- Department of African American and African Studies
Job Titles:
- Department of History and African American and African Studies
Job Titles:
- Member of the Queer & Trans Studies Search Committee
- Member of Committee
- Professor
Job Titles:
- Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Literatures
- Professor and Chair of the Department of Slavic
Yana Hashamova is Professor and Chair of the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures and an Associate Faculty member of the Departments of Comparative Studies, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, the Interdisciplinary Program of Film Studies, and the Mershon Center for International Security Studies. Dr. Hashamova is also Associate Researcher at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (Institute of Culture and Memory Studies).