Graduate Student Profiles
in the Department of Women Studies
  • Zakiya Adair - Interests include: women's 19th and 20th century social and cultural history (broadly defined). Specifically, Black women entertainers performing abroad during the period of the Harlem Renaissance, looking at Josephine Baker and the ways in which race, sex, and class shift within a trans-Atlantic and transnational context. Grant Activities and Awards: Graduate Opportunity McNair Research Fellowship 2001-2002; President's Scholars Fellowship 2001-2004. Email: kiya4518@u.washington.edu.
  • Vero Barrera - Interests include: Analyzing the tension between memory as praxis of Human Rights/Left struggles for social justice and neo liberal models in Latin America; using multi-sited ethnographic methods to examine memory as an activist tool to resist neo liberal ideologies and the overarching gender dynamics present in the everyday actions of activists. Activism, Latin American social movements, memory struggles, race, class, gender, transnational feminist theory, and documentary film. Grant Activities and Awards: Bank of America Diversity Fellowship 2004; 2006 Doman Award for Excellence in Teaching, Women Studies, UW. Email: veronb@u.washington.edu.
  • Amy Bhatt - Interests include: transnational feminist theory, development studies, and reproductive health and understandings of sexuality in diasporic South Asian communities. Grant Activities and Awards: FLAS Summer Travel Grant, South Asia Center Summer 2005; FLAS Academic Year Fellowship, South Asia Center 2005-2006; FLAS Academic Year Fellowship, South Asia Center 2006-2007; FLAS Academic Year Fellowship, South Asia Center 2007-2008. Email: abhatt@u.washington.edu.
  • Marylese Borchard
  • Renee Byrd: Political Commitments Include: Participatory Action Research; Race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, and the increasingly global prison-industrial complex; working-class women of color and trangender folks' experiences of police violence; the ways in which policing models are moving across nation-state borders. Email: byrdr@u.washington.edu.
  • Rebecca Castner - Email: burtch@u.washington.edu.
  • Calla Chancellor - - Interests include: Visual cultural studies, youth studies, LGBT/Queer Studies, feminist pedagogies and research methods, critical discourse studies, public humanities, photography, photovoice. Dissertation: Seeing What Queer Youth Know: Visual Epistemologies of Race, Sexuality and Gender (Working title, due for completion 2010). Grant activities and awards: Crossdisciplinary research cluster grant for "Queer Worlds: Exploring the Will to Institutionality" from the Simpson Center for the Humanities, 2008-09; Public Humanities: Engaging the Community grant for the research study "Seeing What Queer Youth Know: A Seattle Photovoice Project" from the Simpson Center for the Humanities, 2008-09; Huckabay Teaching Fellowship, The UW Graduate School, 2008-09; Crossdisciplinary research cluster grant for "Queer Worlds: A Year-Long Project in Queer Cultural Studies" from the Simpson Center for the Humanities, 2007-08; Research Fellow, Institute for the Public Humanities for Doctoral Students, 2006. Email: calla8@u.washington.edu.
  • Sara Diaz
  • Sharmistha Ghosh - Interests include: women and their relation with microfinance institutions and how this particular method of development affects violence in the lives of women. Email: ghoshs@u.washington.edu.
  • Martha Gonzalez
  • Nina Kim - Interests include: Asian American politics and organizing with an emphasis on Asian American women's empowerment. Feminist and critical race theories.Email: ninakim@u.washington.edu.
  • Jan Kinney - Interests include: spiritual experiences and spiritual community in feminist choruses; other practices of feminist spirituality and religion. Dissertation: "'Making Church": The Experience of Spirituality in Women's Choruses" Presentations: "Camp Casey and the Vietnam Memorial: Women's Altars in Masculist Spaces," Idaho State University, 2006. Email: jkinney@u.washington.edu.
  • Kristina Knoll - Interests include: feminism, intersectionality and disability studies; sexual violence, trauma and stigma; feminist theory/philosophy; bridging activism and theory; and German. Grants Activities and Awards: 1998/1999 Fulbright Scholar in Women Studies, Austria; 2003 Master of Arts, Women Studies Practicum, with Communities Against Rape and Abuse & the Disability Pride Project; 2005 Doman Award for Excellence in Teaching, Women Studies, UW. Email: krk@u.washington.edu.
  • Kai Kohlsdorf - Interests include queer theory, transgender studies, transnational feminisms, queer geography, visual cultural studies and discourse studies. Email: kai3@u.washington.edu
  • Amy Peloff - Interests include: Twentieth-century U.S. women's history, media representations of feminism as an idea; feminist historiography. Email: apeloff@u.washington.edu.
  • Nicole Robert - Interests include hidden histories of sexual minorities in museums, queer theory, public humanities, lesbian history (specifically in Seattle), politics of representation, museological theory and history.  Email: nrobert@uw.edu
  • Noralis Rodriguez Email: noralisr@uw.edu
  • Chancellor Sims - Interests include: the impact of nonprofit incorporation on grassroots feminist social movement organizations.Email: simsc@u.washington.edu.