Dr. Nilufer Akalin taught introduction to health disparities, discrimination and health, and a new course focused on gender, race, immigration, and health for the Center. She also coordinated the practicum for the Center’s health disparities in society minor, placing about 200 students over summer, fall, and spring.
Dr. Anita Anantharam was selected for an academic-year sabbatical for 2022-2023. She will focus on finishing her book project on Gender and Food Politics. She was also awarded a Humanities Scholarship Enhancement award to pursue her research during summer 2022. For the past 4 years Dr. Anantharam has worked with The Florida Women’s Conference to nominate outstanding UF/CLAS students for the College Women on the Rise Program. This program is designed to support students’ educational journeys and ease their transition into the workforce. The topics of these interactive workshops for college women ranged from personal branding, mental health and the workplace, tailoring one’s resume for specific job applications, to a hands-on interview and networking workshop. This year, Dr. Anantharam nominated four students all of whom were selected to attend the conference (see Center Students Selected for Women’s Conference of Florida’s College Women on the Rise Program for details).
This was a year that had Dr. Kendal Broad in undergraduate classrooms all year, masked up and negotiating the challenge of teaching in a hyflex context while still striving for critical pedagogy. In addition to teaching Sexualities Studies and LGBTQ+ Movements & Critiques, Dr. Broad also had the privilege of rolling out a new Quest 2 course, Be a Social Justice Activist: #Activism, Intersectionality, and Social Movement Organizing. In addition, Dr. Broad continued to write articles about gay anti-racist activism and published a book chapter with Ecem Ece and Robert Baez (“The Question of Queer and Trans Positive Freedom in the United States”) in On Inequality and Freedom, edited by Lawrence Eppard and Henry Giroux. Finally, Dr. Broad mentored Bailey Hass (a Center MA student), continued to work with six PhD students doing queer and trans sociology (as an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Sociology, Criminology & Law) while also serving another year as Graduate Coordinator (for the Center).
Dr. Manoucheka Celeste celebrated the publication of her co-edited Forum in Communication, Culture, and Critique on women of color mentoring in Communication. She won the CLAS Mentor/Advisor of the Year Award. Her chapter, “No Love”: What Becomes of Post-racial Figures in a New Political Era?, appeared in the Handbook of Global Media Ethics. There, she analyzes a political figure to consider the pitfalls of bargaining with white supremacy, building on Deniz Kandiyoti’s work on bargaining with patriarchy. Dr. Celeste writes, “after an academic year that included the most incredible health challenges and what feels like a lot of miracles, I am most looking forward to a summer of traveling, and as the popular internet saying goes ‘drinking my water and minding my business.’” She was awarded a year-long sabbatical and will be working on her book and her health.
Dr. Hilary Coulson published her first book on women and leadership with colleagues Dr. Frank Fernandez and Dr. Yali Zou. Her first book, Transformational University Leadership: A Case Study for 21st Century Leaders and Aspirational Research Universities explores the presidency of Dr. Renu Khator of the University of Houston and her journey from a small village in India to Chancellor at a major research university in the United States. Dr. Coulson finished writing this book right before welcoming her son, Fox, in November of 2021 and while teaching in the Center. Dr. Coulson had a great first year as faculty at UF and finds great joy in teaching and
recruiting women’s studies majors!
Dr. Maddy Coy has continued her community partnership research with CGSWSR Faculty News the Alachua County Victim Services and Rape Crisis Center and Dr. Alyssa Zucker. She has written two co-authored book chapters reflecting on evidence about the harms of the sex industry and debates about pornography, sexual violence, gender, and age, and has a coauthored article about university policies on faculty and staff sexual misconduct due to be published in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence in summer 2022.
Dr. Jillian Hernandez won a 2021-2022 Teacher of the Year Award from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and was a scholar in residence at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles in Spring 2022. Her book Aesthetics of Excess: The Art and Politics of Black and Latina Embodiment won Honorable Mention for the John Hope Franklin Prize for Most Outstanding Book Published in American Studies from the American Studies Association and the Emily Toth Award for Best Single Work in Women’s Studies from the Popular Culture Association. Dr. Hernandez curated the exhibition Liberatory Adornment: Pamela Council, Yvette Mayorga, Kenya (Robinson) for the Flaten Art Museum in St. Olaf College. The Minneapolis StarTribune recognized Liberatory Adornment as one of the top 10 art exhibitions of 2021.
Dr. Bonnie Moradi coauthored several articles with her current and former students, including articles on Asian American people’s coalition activism (Ouch & Moradi, 2022), sexual minority women’s experiences of objectification (Moradi & Tebbe, 2022), and qualitative research in counseling psychology (Grzanka & Moradi, 2021). With Dr. Frank Fernandez (PI), she is Co-PI on a Spencer Foundation grant to organize an interdisciplinary convening on using intersectionality theory and analysis in quantitative research.
Dr. Hina Shaikh joined the Center as an Assistant Professor in Fall of 2021. She developed and taught a graduate/undergraduate course entitled Data Feminisms where she paired texts from critical data and algorithm studies with practical data skills, such as creating pivot tables in Microsoft Excel and a web-scraping program through the Python programming language. Dr. Shaikh also directs the Data Justice Lab focused on community-centered and collaborative data projects. Dr. Shaikh won a two-year award from the National Humanities Center to collaborate with fifteen faculty nationwide on a Responsible AI Curriculum Design project.
Dr. Constance Shehan addressed UF’s new class of Phi Beta Kappa inductees at the annual banquet in April. Professor Shehan was inducted into Penn State’s chapter of Phi Beta Kappa as a junior in college. She also presented awards to the recipients of the Graduate School’s award for excellence in teaching by graduate assistants at the reception in April.
Dr. Trysh Travis was appointed Associate Dean in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, following in the steps of former CGSWSR colleagues Dr. Angel Kwolek-Folland and Dr. Milagros Peña.
Dr. Alyssa Zucker used her sabbatical year to focus on data collection for a project with Dr. Maddy Coy tracking police and prosecution outcomes of rape cases in Alachua County, FL. This community collaboration with the Alachua County Victim Services and Rape Crisis Center aims to improve justice for victim-survivors of rape. Using funding from a Charles T. Woods grant from the Center, Dr. Zucker worked with Center certificate student Hannah Brown and two collaborators from University at Buffalo on a survey to examine majoritized women’s support for marginalized women’s sexual rights; a paper from this project has been accepted for publication in The Journal of Sex Research. Dr. Zucker was honored to win the 2022 Division of Student Life Mort Wolfson Award for her work championing the development of UF’s new LGBTQ+ focused living-learning community, Lavender LLC.
This story appears in the Spring 2022 issue of the Gender, Sexualities, & Women’s Studies Newsletter. Read more from the issue.