Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was an American novelist, producer, director, and artist of South Korean origin, best known for her 1982 novel, Dictée. Considered an avant-garde artist, Cha was fluent in Korean, English, and French. The main body of Cha's work is "looking for the roots of language before it is born on the tip of the tongue." Cha's practice experiments with language through repetition, manipulation, reduction, and isolation, exploring the ways in which language marks one's identity, in unstable and multiple expressions. Cha's interdisciplinary background was clearly evident in Dictée, which experiments with juxtaposition and hypertext of both print and visual media. Cha's Dictée is frequently taught in contemporary literature classes including women's literature.
Vivian Carol Sobchack is an American cinema and media theorist and cultural critic.
Saba Mahmood (1961–2018) was professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, she was also affiliated with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Institute for South Asia Studies, and the Program in Critical Theory. Her scholarly work straddled debates in anthropology and political theory, with a focus on Muslim majority societies of the Middle East and South Asia. Mahmood made major theoretical contributions to rethinking the relationship between ethics and politics, religion and secularism, freedom and submission, and reason and embodiment. Influenced by the work of Talal Asad, she wrote on issues of gender, religious politics, secularism, and Muslim and non-Muslim relations in the Middle East.
France Winddance Twine is a Black and Native American sociologist, ethnographer, visual artist, and documentary filmmaker. Twine has conducted field research in Brazil, the UK, and the United States on race, racism, and anti-racism. She has published 11 books and more than 100 articles, review essays, and books on these topics.
Mary Ann Doane is the Class of 1937 Professor of Film and Media at the University of California, Berkeley and was previously the George Hazard Crooker Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She is a pioneer in the study of gender in film.
Linda Williams is an American professor of film studies in the departments of Film Studies and Rhetoric at University of California, Berkeley.
Evelyn Seiko Nakano Glenn is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to her teaching and research responsibilities, she served as founding director of the university's Center for Race and Gender (CRG), a leading U.S. academic center for the study of intersectionality among gender, race and class social groups and institutions. In June 2008, Glenn was elected president of the 15,000-member American Sociological Association. She served as president-elect during the 2008–2009 academic year, assumed her presidency at the annual ASA national convention in San Francisco in August 2009, served as president of the association during the 2009–2010 year, and continued to serve on the ASA governing council as past-president until August 2011. Her presidential address, given at the 2010 meetings in Atlanta, was entitled "Constructing Citizenship: Exclusion, Subordination, and Resistance", and was printed as the lead article in the American Sociological Review.
Celine Parreñas Shimizu is a filmmaker and film scholar. She is well known for her work on race, sexuality and representations. She is currently Dean of the Arts Division at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Smadar Lavie is a Mizrahi U.S.-Israeli anthropologist, author, and activist. She specializes in the anthropology of Egypt, Israel and Palestine, emphasizing issues of race, gender and religion. Lavie is a professor emerita of anthropology at the University of California, Davis, and a visiting scholar at the Department of Ethnic Studies, University of California, Berkeley. Lavie received her doctorate in anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley (1989) and spent nine years as assistant and associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis. She authored The Poetics of Military Occupation, receiving the 1990 Honorable Mention of the Victor Turner Award for Ethnographic Writing, and Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture receiving the 2015 Honorable Mention of the Association of Middle East Women's Studies Book Award Competition. Wrapped in the Flag of Israel's first edition was also one of the four finalists in the 2015 Clifford Geertz Book Award Competition of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion. She also co-edited Creativity/Anthropology and Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity. Lavie won the American Studies Association's 2009 Gloria Anzaldúa Prize for her article, “Staying Put: Crossing the Palestine-Israel Border with Gloria Anzaldúa,” published in Anthropology and Humanism (2011). In 2013, Smadar Lavie won the “Heart at East” Honor Plaque for lifetime service to Mizraḥi communities in Israel-Palestine.
Marsha Kinder is an American film scholar and Professor of Critical Studies at the University of Southern California.
Ellen G. Friedman is an American author, editor, and Professor of English and Women's & Gender Studies at The College of New Jersey where she serves as Coordinator of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies program. Friedman is on the Undergraduate, Graduate, and Honors Faculties. She is the advisor to The Women's Center. Her current research is in cultural and gender studies.
Adrianne Wadewitz was an American feminist scholar of 18th-century British literature, and a Wikipedian and commenter upon Wikipedia, particularly focusing on gender issues. In April 2014, Wadewitz died from head injuries from a fall while rock climbing.
Jigna Desai is a Professor in the Department of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies and Asian American Studies, currently at the University of Minnesota. She is a writer, teacher, mentor, artist, and engaged researcher whose scholarship crosses many fields of study including transnational feminism, Asian American Studies, queer studies, postcolonial feminism, critical disability studies, critical youth studies, feminist media studies, critical ethnic studies, and critical university studies. She has also written extensively on issues of racial and gender disparities and social justice.
Petra Kuppers is a community performance artist and a disability culture activist. She is a professor of English, Women's and Gender Studies, Theater and Dance, and Art and Design, teaching mainly in Performance Studies and Disability Studies, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and she serves on the faculty of Goddard College's MFA program in Interdisciplinary Arts. Her book Gut Botany was named one of New York Public Library's "Best Books of 2020."
Lisa E. Bloom is an American cultural critic, educator and feminist art historian specializing in polar studies, contemporary art, environmental art, history of photography, visual culture and film studies and is known for her books and essay contributions to these areas.
Patricia Zavella is an anthropologist and professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz in the Latin American and Latino Studies department. She has spent a career advancing Latina and Chicana feminism through her scholarship, teaching, and activism. She was president of the Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists and has served on the executive board of the American Anthropological Association. In 2016, Zavella received the American Anthropological Association's award from the Committee on Gender Equity in Anthropology to recognize her career studying gender discrimination. The awards committee said Zavella’s career accomplishments advancing the status of women, and especially Latina and Chicana women have been exceptional. She has made critical contributions to understanding how gender, race, nation, and class intersect in specific contexts through her scholarship, teaching, advocacy, and mentorship. Zavella’s research focuses on migration, gender and health in Latina/o communities, Latino families in transition, feminist studies, and ethnographic research methods. She has worked on many collaborative projects, including an ongoing partnership with Xóchitl Castañeda where she wrote four articles some were in English and others in Spanish. The Society for the Anthropology of North America awarded Zavella the Distinguished Career Achievement in the Critical Study of North America Award in the year 2010. She has published many books including, most recently, "I'm Neither Here Nor There, Mexicans"Quotidian Struggles with Migration and Poverty, which focuses on working class Mexican Americans struggle for agency and identity in Santa Cruz County.
Tejaswini Niranjana is an Indian professor, cultural theorist, translator and author. She is best known for her contribution to the fields of culture studies, gender studies, translation, and ethnomusicology. She is the daughter of Kannada playwright and novelist Niranjana and writer Anupama Niranjana. Her partner is Indian author and cultural theorist, Ashish Rajadhyaksha.
Deboleena Roy is professor and chair of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology at Emory University, former resident research fellow at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research, Stanford University, and a member of The NeuroGenderings Network. Previously, she was an assistant professor at San Diego State University. Starting in August 2020, she will be serving as the Senior Associate Dean of Faculty for Emory College of Arts and Sciences.
The Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz constitutes one of the oldest departments of gender and sexuality studies in the world. It was founded as a women's studies department in 1974. It is considered among the most influential departments in feminist studies, post-structuralism, and feminist political theory. In addition to its age and reputation, the department is significant for its numerous notable faculty, graduates, and students.
Elizabeth Bernstein is an American sociologist who is noted for her studies that focus on women, gender, and sexuality. She is also a professor at Columbia University's Barnard College.
