Graduate Students

Email: dayne.brenna.alexander@emory.edu

Dayne is a third-year WGSS Ph.D. 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.

Email: Amanda.faith.anderson@emory.edu

Amanda F. Anderson's graduate work turns to 20-21st century African American literary, visual, theatrical, and cinematic texts to examine the contemporary appeal to the power of shared feelings. Her dissertation critiques attachments to empathy, witness, 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 the violation. She argues that a black feminist theory of shared feelings will provide a grammar to articulate the relationship between mutuality and power in the afterlives of slavery.

Anderson holds a dual B.A. from Brandeis University with the highest honors in Psychology and African and African American Studies (with a specialization in literature and the arts).

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: 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.spencer.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 genderfluid 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 genderfluid bodybuilder in Asia. 

Siufung’s publication: “Transgender Trouble: Gender Transcendence in self-ethnographic genderqueer experience in Hong Kong,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Special Issue: Rethinking Queer: Androgynous Bodies and Cultures in East Asia, 2021.  

Website: www.sfunglaw.com

Email: Suzanne.c.persard@emory.edu

Suzanne C. Persard is a doctoral candidate in the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Emory University. Her dissertation, "Queering Jahaji: An Indo-Caribbean Genealogy of Speculative Erotics," examines the figure of the jahaji as a mode of queer kinship on the indentured plantation by reading historical archives, film, political activism, and drag.  

Suzanne serves as an Advisory Member of the Studies in Sexualities and creator of the Queer x Indentureship series, a multimedia public symposium convening scholars, performance artists, writers, archivists and drag performers. 

PUBLICATIONS 

"Coconut/Cane & Cutlass: Queer Visuality in the Indo-Caribbean Lesbian Archive." Middle Atlantic Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 4, no. 2 (December 2020), pp. 40-55 

"Queering Chutney: Disrupting Heteronormative Approaches to Indo-Caribbean Epistemology,"Journal of West Indian Literature, vol. 26, no. 1 (April 2018) 

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

Shiv D Sharma enjoys writing about desires and fantasies that underpin people's everyday intimate, socio-cultural, and political experiences. Shiv has a MA in Historical Studies from The New School, where his academic work was honored with an Outstanding Graduate Student award. It is also 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. At Emory, Shiv would like to jostle with theory on questions related to desire, fantasy, queerness, and contemporary politics. 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 that he helped set up at Ashoka University, India, in 2015.

Current Projects: Shiv is currently working on a conversational writing project that aims to build public scholarship on issues about gender, sexuality, and queer feminisms through collective dialogues. 

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: 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/