Congratulations to our MA Graduates!
Ebonee Brown graduated with her MA in Women’s Studies in Spring 2023. She successfully defended her thesis titled, “‘My Skin My Logo’: Constructions and Deconstructions of Black Masculinity in Atlanta’s Southern Hip-Hop” Ebonee recently returned to her community and has secured a job as an administrator for a local think tank.
Beth Holden graduated with her MA in Women’s Studies in Spring 2023. She successfully defended her thesis titled, “How Do We Reach Recovery? Autonomous Recovery as Liberatory Praxis.” She plans to attend the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in the Fall where she will start a PhD program in Sociology and begin teaching a Women’s Studies undergraduate course.
Kelsey Malles graduated with her MA in Women’s Studies in Spring 2023. Under the supervision of her committee, Dr. Anita Anantharam and Dr. Niler Akalin, she successfully defended her Master’s project “Veganism as a Feminist Practice: Exploring Intersectionality Through an Ecofeminist Lens.” She is grateful to her cohort and the Department staff and faculty for their continued support.
Nagdeska Paulino graduated with her MA in Women’s Studies in Spring 2023. She successfully defended her MA project, “Expiration Date: Climate Change, Colonialism, and Narrative,” which involved a conceptual art exhibit in Ustler Hall. Nagdeska looks forward to exploring her options this summer while continuing to focus on artistic expression as a means to foster difficult but necessary conversations in society.
Elisa Rios graduated with an MA in Women’s Studies in the Spring of 2023. Thanks to the mentorship and care of Dr. Jillian Hernandez, she successfully defended her thesis titled, “Voices of Afro-Latinas: Oral Herstories Exploring their Ethnic and Racial Identities because they are Not Being Heard!” During her time in the program, she presented her work at the 2023 National Women’s Studies Association Conference. She is excited for her post-academic future and opportunities. She thanks department faculty, cohorts, and Donna Tuckey for continued support throughout her MA.
News and Updates From our Continuing Graduate Students
As a rising 2nd year MA student, Mona Ashour will continue to work on her thesis, under the supervision of Dr. Hina Shaikh and Dr. Terry Harpold. In March, Mona was selected as an Off-Campus Ambassador by the UF Division of Student Life. Mona served as chair of the Gender Studies Panel for a virtual conference, held on March 24th, by the University of Oradea in Romania.
Rose Capo (she/her) is a rising second-year M.A. candidate in the Department. She is currently working on her thesis tentatively titled “Sex Education in Florida: Queer Floridian Experiences in the Digital Age” that investigates how self-identifying queer Floridians use digital media as a supplemental resource for a comprehensive sex education. Rose’s methods of oral histories and a pleasure map art praxis will be compiled into a mini-documentary that can to be used as a sex education resource that is accessible to the public. She is excited to begin filming and writing her first chapter this summer.
Ecem Ece is a second-year MA student in the department and a sixth-year PhD in Sociology at UF. During the summer, Ecem will work on their MA and PhD projects on queer activism in Turkey. They will analyze their interviews with queer activists in/from Turkey and oral history archives organized by a queer organization in Turkey.
Ceci Luna is a rising second-year M.A. candidate in the Department. She is currently working on her research project examining gender-inclusive suffixes such as -x and -e as a tool for queer Latinx gender and sexual expression and performance of the queer Latinx imaginary. During the summer, they will be conducting oral histories and art workshops with participants under the supervision of Dr. Jillian Hernandez.
Angelica McGee will continue working on her thesis project, tentatively titled, “Black “Boy” Joy: Afropean Art, Cultures and Lived Experiences”, which explores antinarrative photo poems and oral history accounts of Black men living in Scotland, Italy and France. In addition, she will be transcribing and editing her oral history work with The Samuel Proctor Oral History Program for the archive that she founded this Spring 2023, entitled “Black Joy”. Before heading home to Las Vegas for a respite in her efforts, she represented GSWS at the UF Center for Public Interest Communications Summer Institute in Houston, Texas.
Tegan Smith will continue research for her MA thesis, focusing on ecofeminist and posthuman understandings of subjectivity. She has already completed a draft of two chapters and is writing a third chapter over the summer with the supervision of Dr. Hina Shaikh.