Graduate Students

Email: dayne.brenna.alexander@emory.edu

Dayne Alexander is a Ph.D. Candidate in The Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University and a Laney Graduate School Fellow. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Sociology from Appalachian State University (2012) and a Master of Arts in Women’s & Gender Studies from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (2016). Her research interests include Critical Animal Studies; interspecies ethics; antihumanist and posthumanist philosophies; ecofeminisms; and Foucauldian genealogy, biopolitics, and ethics. 

Dayne’s dissertation, “Eating Archive: A Genealogy of Vermin Unreason and its Implications for Thinking Interspecies Ethics in the Anthropocene,” brings together work in Critical Animal Studies, Foucault Studies, Feminist theory, Queer theory, Critical Race Studies, and work in the environmental humanities on ethics and the Anthropocene to think about vermin unreason—what her project calls verminization or “eating archive.” At stake in this exploration of animality, alterity, and archive is the undoing of the human subject and how to think about interspecies ethical comportment through and as that undoing. 

Email: Amanda.faith.anderson@emory.edu

Amanda F. Anderson is a doctoral candidate in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and a ’22-’23 Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow. She graduated from Brandeis University with a B.A. (Hons) in Psychology and African and African American Studies (with a specialization in literature and the arts). Her graduate research examines the relationship between mutuality and power in the afterlives of slavery. In her dissertation, "'Is My Blackness Getting on You?": Race, Porousness, and the Problem of Empathy" she turns to 20-21st century African American literary, visual, theatrical, and cinematic texts to examine the contemporary appeal to the power of shared feelings. She critiques attachments to empathy and mutual identification, positing instead, a new mode of communal reckoning through what she terms ‘porousness’ (the collusion between self and other in an account of the subject). She advocates for an understanding of how legacies of slavery subtend this relationality and produce for Black people, a distinct and intensified vulnerability to violation.  

Some of Anderson’s recent work has been published in Feminist Formations: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/757531  

Email: victor.albiny.bene@emory.edu

Victor Ultra Omni earned a Bachelor of Arts in Africana Studies with the highest honors from the Claremont Colleges in Southern California, where they held the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship. Their undergraduate thesis “Shade and Survival: A Neo-Slave Narrative of Pioneer Kevin Ultra Omni” deployed the analytic of maroonage to theorize a counter-historiography of the 1980s ballroom scene in New York City. They are a proud member of the iconic worldwide house of Ultra Omni.

Their research interests include the house and ballroom scene, Black Feminist theory, Trans Studies, and Black Marxism. More broadly, Victor is interested in the burgeoning formation of Black Trans Studies. 

Victor is also a graduate board member and peer reviewer with Duke University Press’ Transgender Studies Quarterly. They have featured their writing in the Journal of School & Society, Truth-Out, and in the forthcoming anthology, Black Trans Love is Black Trans Wealth. In 2018, Victor began the Center for Black Trans Though to address the epistemic injustice which excludes, appropriates and erases Black trans presence in Academia.

Email: saneta.devuono-powell@emory.edu 

Saneta DeVuono-Powell (she/her/they) received both her master's in City and Urban Planning and her law degree from the University of California, Berkeley. Her work and research are focused on housing and property in the context of reparations and race. She has an undergraduate degree from Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied Film and Latin American Literature and she was a Fulbright scholar in Spain.

Email: dian.dian@emory.edu

Dian Dian is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. Their/Her current research plan aims to explore how the discourse and activism of gender and sexuality in the Sinophone world produce new possibilities in the transnational feminist movement today and their interaction with “western” ideas about LGBT identity, queer theory, and feminism.  

Dian has received two BAs in Chinese Classics and Political Philosophy in Beijing. They/She also began to work on gender and sexuality issues as a lesbian activist there since 2009. After moving to Hong Kong and got her Mphil in History from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Dian continued their/her activist work mainly by serving as the chief editor of Queer Lala Times, an online media focusing on issues about gender and sexuality in the Chinese speaking areas. She also worked for the Chinese Lala Alliance, a cross-region network for Chinese Lala(LBTI) activists and groups. 

Dian’s recent publication is a work of translation: 2019 (Co-translator) Mary Wollstonecraft. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects. Taiwan: Wu-Nan Book Inc.

Email: aobo.dong@emory.edu

Aobo received his B.A. in the College of Social Studies (CSS) from Wesleyan University and M.T.S. from Harvard University. He held dual research fellowships studying the intersections of religion, ethics, and politics at Harvard Divinity and Harvard Law School.

As a Ph.D. student at Emory, Aobo is primarily interested in how queer/non-traditional kinship relations, such as same-sex romantic or spiritual friendships, subvert and reinvent western-centric queer theory and heteronormative gender genealogies. His academic interests in WGSS also extend to how queer and gender theories translate into and interact with legal epistemologies in East Asia, the United States, and international human rights regimes.

Email:robert.spenser.feller@emory.edu

Shelley Feller holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Alabama. Their interests include queer theory, psychoanalysis, poetry, and 90s figure skating. They wrote Dream Boat (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2020).

Email: mansi.hitesh@emory.edu

Mansi earned an MPhil in Gender Studies from the University of Cambridge, where she received the title of the Bell Scholar 2019-2020 for producing the best research dissertation, “Trans, Transnationality, and the Race/Gender Analogue.” Prior to this, she completed a Bachelor of Arts with Honors and Distinction in WGSS and Philosophy as a Davis UWC Scholar at Colby College. Her scholarly interests lie in bridging citational gaps between New Materialisms, Transnational Feminisms, and theories of Liberation. She aims to enable ethical and effective feminist theorizing of the relationship between alterity, subalternity, and liberation as concepts and praxis.

Email: caroline.jackson@emory.edu

Caroline (She/Her/Hers) has a MA from the Women’s, Gender, and Sexualities Studies at Georgia State University and previously received her BA in Women’s and Gender Studies from the University of South Florida – Tampa. Her research focuses on queer disabled people’s personal narratives of sex, and how those narratives can help us uncover the unique and varied ways that sex affects our perceptions of the self, our relationships, our bodies, and shame. While at Emory, she hopes to expand upon her MA thesis work, which explores a cross-crip praxis of lust. Caroline also has taught two sections of Intro to WGSS at Georgia State University and considers the experience of teaching to be critical to her own feminist praxis.

Email: sooyoung.kim@emory.edu

Sooyoung received her master’s in Culture and Gender Studies from Yonsei University, South Korea. Her research interests include transgender studies, trans political economy, trans of color critique, and ethnography. Her work explores how trans bodies are arranged alongside the current flow of capital and how this arrangement formulates the modes of trans labor and lives.

Email: wan.ling.law@emory.edu

Siufung received their MPhil. in Transgender Studies at The University of Hong Kong. Their research interests include transgender studies, queer theory, Asian studies, and feminist ethnography. Their purposed Ph.D. project aims to engage critically with trans theories to conceptualize nonbinary identities and bodies that transcend the either-or dichotomy in Western binary systems. They draw on theoretical, methodological, and philosophical frameworks to address the gender fluid and intersectional experiences that situate within the geopolitics of queer Asia. 

Outside school, Siufung is a pioneer in advocating gender fluidity in Hong Kong and the first professional nonbinary bodybuilder in Asia.  

Website: www.sfunglaw.com 

Email: smand38@emory.edu 

They received an A.M. in American Studies from Brown University and a B.A. in Sociology and Social and Cultural Analysis from New York University. Their research interests sit within questions of orientalism in the commodification of intimate life, South Asian diaspora and empire, and the co-constitutive structures of race, caste, class, and gender. Shromona is a first-year W.G.S.S. Ph.D. student investigating the cultural production and political organizing of Indian American elite Hindu women. You can also find their writing, editing, and facilitating community with Sinister Wisdom: A Multicultural Lesbian Literary & Art Journal.

Email: margaret.murphy@emory.edu 

Milo is a third year PhD student in the WGSS department. Their research seeks to understand the discourses and rhetoric that obscure and even condone structural and epistemic violence against trans*, non-binary, and gender non-conforming Americans. Their other interests include human rights discourses and epistemologies of the human; critiques of liberalism; and decolonial gender/trans studies.  

Email: manjari.sahay@emory.edu 

Manjari is drawn to the intersection of reproductive and nationalist politics, which she primarily studies using ethnographic methods. She has a BA (Honours) in Political Science from Ashoka University and an MSc in Gender, Development, and Globalisation from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Prior to joining Emory, she was engaged in an independent research project in India’s National Capital Region. The project, conducted in light of the commercial surrogacy ban and COVID-19 outbreak, explored the subjectivity and agency of commercial surrogates.

Her own scholarly pursuits aside, Manjari has provided research assistance on multiple books pertaining to gender, sexuality, and colonialism in India. She is also a keen public writer with bylines in The Wire, Strange Horizons, and Engenderings, among others.

Website: https://linktr.ee/manjarisahay 

New Delhi in India (GMT+5:30) | Email: shiv.datt.sharma@emory.edu

Shiv D Sharma enjoys writing about desires and fantasies that underpin our intimate as well as socio-cultural and political lives, and how these categories inform as well as challenge feminist/ queer/ trans theory and praxis. Shiv has a MA in Historical Studies from The New School, and is a past recipient of the Fulbright scholarship (2018). Spanning multiple disciplines, his MA thesis examined various public sites of sexual knowledge production, traveling from sex museums in the U.S. to sexological clinics in India. For his doctoral journey at Emory, Shiv is broadly interested in working at the intersection of the fields of feminist and queer theory, psychoanalysis, film theory and poststructuralist cultural studies. Besides his scholarly pursuits, Shiv has been actively involved in queer feminist advocacy through his work at the Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexuality which he helped set up at Ashoka University, India, in 2015. 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shiv-d-sharma-82521753/ 

Email: rinchen.thakur@emory.edu

Rinchen is currently navigating intersections of affect, anxiety, and agency for stories of the processes of being, through scholarly research and life-world experience. In the main, she wishes to draw out the spectrum of social life of anxiety  as articulated in and by the bodyminds of anxious beings. She intends to engage with the philosophic and psychoanalytic body of work on effect toward building a theory of  anxious agency. Her research will take her to the National Capital Region of northern India. 

Rinchen has grown up in different parts of India. Among a plethora of activities, she enjoys eating, laughing, loitering, observing, thinking, and writing. Working with young minds is one of her passions and she wishes to spend the rest of her days doing research and facilitating learning.

Email: monique.wimby@emory.edu 

Monique Wimby studied for a Master’s in Philosophy as a Trinity Fellow at Marquette University and completed her bachelor’s degrees in dance and English at Brenau University. She has worked for the National Organization for Women in Washington, D.C., completed two years of City Year for AmeriCorps in Jacksonville, Florida, and served in Peace Corps Indonesia from 2015 – 2017. Upon returning to Atlanta, Georgia in 2017, Monique worked as a freelance dancer, director, and choreographer in Metro Atlanta. Her current research prioritizes the positive investigation into Black women’s embodiment, consciousness, and spirituality in the U.S. rural South and the Caribbean. 

Email: Samantha.pinson.wrisley@emory.edu

Samantha Pinson Wrisley is a Ph.D. Candidate in The Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. A Georgia native, Samantha is a graduate of Georgia State University’s Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies MA program (2017). She completed her undergraduate work in Clinical/Experimental Psychology (BSc) and Women’s Studies (BA) at the University of Georgia (2014).  

Samantha’s dissertation is titled “Misogyny, A Condition: Feminism, Heteropessimism, and the Self.” In this project, she critiques common feminist deployments of misogyny – specifically the tendency to conflate misogyny with either sexism and/or violence committed against women – while developing her own view of misogyny. This view argues that misogyny is best conceptualized as an ontoepistemological condition characterized by deeply held ambivalence toward women and the feminine. This project is essentially a meta-engagement of themes from her early work, which explores the affective foundations of hate movements in the United States, including the Alt-Right, Men’s Rights, Incel, and others. Broadly speaking, her research draws from critical theory, social ontology, psychoanalysis, feminist theory, literary theory, and queer theory.  

Samantha is part of the Center for Women’s First Generation Graduate Women’s Collective and participates in Emory’s First Generation Low Income Partnership (FLIP) program. 

 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samantha-pinson-wrisley-50bb61213/