Graduate Students

Dayne is a third-year WGSS PhD student and Laney Graduate School Fellow, holding a Bachelor of Science in Sociology from Appalachian State University and a Master of Arts in Women’s & Gender Studies from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her research interests include Critical Animal Studies, Posthumanisms, Ecofeminisms, Foucauldian Genealogy, and Foucauldian Ethics.

Amanda Anderson earned a dual B.A from Brandeis University with Highest Honors in African and Afro-American Studies and Psychology. Her undergraduate thesis, “The Space Between: A Critical Examination of Psychic and Social Relations in Black Women’s Subjecthood” investigates the ways in which the affective states of mourning, grief, depression, “the blues” register generally black women’s psychic lives following legacies of slavery and black women’s ongoing and particular vulnerability to multiple forms of gendered and sexualized harm.

Her work explores critical questions at the interstices of historical and cultural configurations and black women’s psychic capacity. Through literary analysis, she posits black feminism, the racialization of space and place, and queer of color critique as potential mechanisms to address black women’s psychic and social formations.

Seba Boersma's research engages racial/sexual violence as a problem for modern thought.

Along these lines, they trouble the ground upon which feminist/queer/trans theory takes root. They are passionate about dependency, love, and all things sapphic.

Dian Dian has got two BAs in Chinese Classics and Philosophy from Renmin University of China and one MPhil in History from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her previous academic training was not about Gender Studies, but working as a lesbian activist in China for more than 6 years finally sets her on the journey of pursuing a PhD in WGSS.

Her tentative research plan aims to explore how the “Queer Lala” discourse in China emerging with the convergence of lesbian identity, queer theory and feminism and whether/how it may add to narratives and critiques of China in a transnational and postcolonial context.

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

As a PhD 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.

Shelley feller holds a BA from the University of Michigan and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama. Their research interests include posthumanism, poetry, the occult, and transgender studies. Shelley is an avid figure skating fan.

Haylee Christine Harrell is a Diversity Graduate Fellow in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.  Haylee's research interests include Interracial Literature, African-American Art and Literature, Critical Black Studies, Critical Mixed Race Studies, Sexuality Studies, and Feminist Philosophy.

Currently, Haylee's project utilizes Foucaultian genealogy to explore the tension between ontological and epistemological theories of blackness in contemporary discussions in Critical Black Studies through the figure of the anachronistic "mulatta" and contemporary discursive formations of the "mixed-race black."

Jordan Johnson is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. Entitled “Encountering the Forest Archive: A Feminist Genealogy of the East Texas Pineywoods” her dissertation analyzes practices of forestry and resource management through the lens of feminist science and technology studies, exploring how processes of industrialization and development have operationalized shifting notions of the natural world, technology, and land use.

Situated at the intersection of environmental studies, feminist materialism, and posthumanist theory, her work incorporates literary/textual analysis alongside historical and archival methods to produce a Foucauldian genealogy of forestry and environmental management on the Angelina National Forest, exploring how environmental-industrial legacies in the Pineywoods expose limitations and incongruities inherent in liberal humanist fantasies of progress, development, and sustainability.

Most centrally, her dissertation seeks to explore how an analysis of forest management on the Angelina might contribute to feminist and queer theorizations of environmental ethics, attending to how various forestry projects frame subjectivity, agency, embodiment, environment, and responsibility.

Jordan holds a Bachelor of Arts from Southwestern University in English, Spanish, and Feminist Studies, and is the recipient of the Debbie Ellis Award in Feminist Studies. She has also worked as the managing editor of Southern Spaces: A Journal about Real and Imagined Spaces and Places of the US South and their Global Connections.

Taryn D. Jordan is a PhD candidate in the Department Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

Her research interests lie in Black Studies, Black Feminism, and Affect Studies. Her dissertation “A Peculiar Sense: A Feminist Genealogy of (Black) Soul” brings together her research interests by tracing a genealogy of the decent, emergence, and use of “soul” by black folks.

She received her B.S. in Political Science from Northern Arizona University and M.A. in Women’s Studies from Georgia State University. Taryn has invested her life in social justice work. She blends her political work and academic interests into a productive relationship where struggle and theory mutually inform one another creating the conditions for an intellectual and political spiral.

Originally from Southern California, Sara Kass graduated from Muhlenberg College (in Allentown, Pennsylvania) in 2018 with a B.S. in Neuroscience and a minor in Women’s and Gender Studies.

With one foot in the sciences and one in the humanities, Sara intends to explore questions of consciousness, queer intimacy, feminist science, and technology studies and wants to continue to find ways to fuse her passions for both bench research and theory. She grapples primarily with the “hard problem” of neuroscience: how to connect the phenomenal experiences of everyday consciousness with the propositional “data” of the brain.

Outside of school, Sara finds joy in hiking, reading, and all things yellow.

Ryan Kendall is a PhD candidate in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Ryan came to Emory University after receiving her BA in English with a concentration in Rhetoric and Composition from the University of North Texas.

Her scholarly interests range across feminist theory, queer theory, psychoanalytic studies, critical race studies, literary theory, and rhetorical studies. Ryan’s dissertation work seeks to reconcile queer theoretical inquiries that privilege non-reproductive sexuality with feminist political investments in reproduction as a central—though not unproblematic—constituent of sexuality.

Her work meditates on the possibility of a queer theory of sexual reproduction that might assist in building coalitional thought between queer and feminist politics. In addition to dissertating, Ryan currently serves as an editorial assistant to the academic journal James Baldwin Review.

Stephanie Koziej is a PhD Candidate in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and a psychoanalytic candidate at Emory’s Psychoanalytic Institute. She currently holds a Mellon Interventions Public Scholarship teaching fellowship. She is originally from Belgium where she received her Masters and Mphil degree in Philosophy at the KU Leuven. She was a Fulbright grantee at Johns Hopkins’ Humanities Center before she moved to Emory.

Her current research focuses on the forgotten concept of tenderness (Zärtlichkeit) in the history of psychoanalysis and its radical potential for rethinking subjectivity, sociality, and the erotic. Her writings combine psychoanalyst, feminist, queer, postcolonial, affect, performance art and cultural studies lenses. She also explores tenderness through media art and has created interactive visual and sound installations, soundscapes, and music videos with brainwaves, voice, ukulele, and city noises.

Her teaching style is equally characterized by an interdisciplinary and multimodal approach. In her classes, students study critical theory in tandem with art, culminating in the creation and public display of their own subversive art pieces. https://koziejstephanie.wordpress.com/

Noemi Yoko Molitor, M. A., is a visual artist, researcher, and journalist. She studied Gender Studies and European Ethnology at Humboldt University Berlin and Cornell University.

Her dissertation project at WGSS, “Chrononauts in Chromotopia: Queer Art movements through space, time and matter”, connects the fields of visual arts and queer theory, while interweaving academic research and artistic research practice. Considering the works of painters Katrin Plavčak, Julie Mehretu, and Katharina Grosse, the project explores the autonomy of paint-color, queer migrations through time and space and the sexuality of painting. Molitor is a member of Emory’s Visual Scholarship Initiative.

Her essays on lesbian and queer films have appeared in Sissy and other magazines. In 2015, she worked as a research assistant for the exhibition Homosexualität_en / Homosexuality_ies at the German Historical Museum and the Gay Museum*, Berlin. Group exhibitions and screenings include Queer: Post-sexual – The Box Re-examined, 15th FRINGE! Queer film and arts festival, London, 2015; Queer Arts Festival, Vancouver, Canada, 2016; and Cinequeer Film Fest, Eyedrum Gallery, Atlanta, 2016.

Suzanne C. Persard is a Ph.D. candidate in the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Emory University. Born and raised in Bronx, New York to parents from Kingston, Jamaica, she received a BA in English from Binghamton University, pursued a Masters in English at George Mason University and studied Shakespeare abroad at the University of Oxford. Her scholarship engages with queer and feminist theory to read (Indo-) Caribbean epistemologies, archives and cultural production. Her scholarly interests include Indo-Jamaican historiography; affect and diaspora studies; and decolonial theories that problematize formations of gender and citizenship. Her latest journal article, "Queering Chutney: Disrupting Heteronormative Approaches to Indo-Caribbean Epistemology," appears in the Journal of West Indian Literature, vol. 26, no 1 (April 2018).

 Currently a member of the Studies in Sexualities Advisory Committee at Emory University, she is the 2018 recipient of a Small Axe Literary Prize in Poetry (2nd place) for her series of poems, "Ancestral Coda," and the recipient of a 2018 Studies in Sexualities Prize - Highly-Commended Essay, for her essay, "Decriminalizing Section 377: The Limits of Decolonizing Brown Queer."

 A founding member of Jahajee Sisters, the first 501(c)(3) organization in the country committed to ending gender-based violence against Indo-Caribbean women, Suzanne has a significant history as a writer and activist in social justice movements in New York City: creating and facilitating political education workshops focused on queer reproductive justice and immigrants' rights; working with youth on campaigns to end the School-to-Prison Pipeline; and founding the Queer/Trans Indo-Caribbean Women's Collective, where she facilitated LGBT support groups at the LGBT Center in New York City. In 2014, she was profiled by the Smithsonian for her contributions to Indo-Caribbean writing and activism in the U.S.; her poem, "Elegy: 1838," a series of haikus on Indian indentureship, was featured as part of this profile.

 From 2014-2019, she served as an expert advisor to Amnesty International in the role of LGBT Thematic Specialist. During this period, she authored issue briefs on abuses against transgender women incarcerated in U.S. prison system; conversion therapy used against LGBT youth in the United State; and worked closely with legal clinics throughout the country, providing expert statements to LGBT asylum-seekers from Jamaica, Honduras and Guatemala, in addition to supporting interventions for asylum-seekers fleeing political violence in Bangladesh. She has also served as a Rapporteur to The Carter Center during the 2018 Human Rights Defenders Forum, presided over by President Jimmy Carter.

Samia Vasa is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. Her doctoral research project, tentatively titled “Repeating the Unreadable: Sexual Violence, Radical Feminism, and Psychoanalysis,” conducts psychoanalytic, literary and queer-negative readings of Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin and the Gujarat riots of 2002.

Caroline is a PhD student in the Emory WGSS program. She holds a BA in Science, Technology, and Society from Vassar College. Her research interests include feminist science studies and queer bioethics. 

Samantha Pinson Wrisley is a PhD student in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. A native Atlantan, Samantha came to Emory after completing her MA in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Georgia State University in 2017, and her BA in Women’s Studies and BS in (Clinical/Experimental) Psychology at The University of Georgia in 2014.

Her scholarly interests are far-reaching and include feminist and queer theory, psychoanalysis, affect studies, political theory, anti-humanism, nihilism, and literary theory. Samantha’s dissertation critiques contemporary feminist theorizations of misogyny, in particular feminist theory's investments in locating misogyny outside the subject as a set of behaviors or violences, rather than an affective/psychological frame of mind, i.e., a condition.