Graduate Students

Email: saphronia.carson@emory.edu

Saphronia (Saffy) Carson is a PhD student in the department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She received her master’s in Sociology and her bachelor’s in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Central Florida. She researches reproductive justice from an intersectional Black Feminist lens, examining the material and discursive implications of racism and sexism in anti-abortion legislation and case law. Her masters thesis used feminist critical discourse analysis to examine the misogynoir and post-racial epistemologies in Dobbs v. Jackson. Her dissertation will theorize the dialectic of oppression and activism by interrogating the ways in which reproductive oppression is enacted in post-Roe state legislation, and the ways in which reproductive justice organizers resist that oppression.

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: ololade.faniyi@emory.edu

Ololade Faniyi holds an MA in American Culture Studies from Bowling Green State University, Ohio, and an MA in African Studies and a BA in English from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. Her research interests include digital humanities, hashtagged/affective publics, digital communication, political communication, data feminism, and African Studies. As PhD student at Emory WGGS, her graduate research focuses on examining patterns of usage, affect, representation, and communication related to Nigerian contemporary gender and sexuality justice within digital networks. Her sole and collaborative works have been published in journals such as Communication, Culture, and Critique, Women's Studies Quarterly, Feminist Encounters, Women’s Studies in Communication, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. She is a ‘23 Data Fellow for Cornell University's digital history project, "Freedom on the Move." She serves as an African advisor for FRIDA, The Young Feminist Fund.

Email:robert.spenser.feller@emory.edu

Spenser Shelley Feller is a poet and figure skater from the Midwest. Their research and teaching interests include Queer Studies, Transgender Studies, Feminist Theory, Critical Race Studies, psychoanalysis, histories of queerly gendered and trans erotic print culture, creative writing, and modern and contemporary American poetry. His dissertation examines how the pornographic figure of the sissy haunts feminism and trans-feminine cultural production in order to intervene into broader conversations around gender identity and sex panics. Their debut poetry collection, Dream Boat, won the Editor's Choice Award at Cleveland State University Poetry Center. In 2021, they were nominated for a Georgia Author of the Year Award.

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 in 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 MA research focused on personal narratives of queer disabled sex and what she calls a "cross-crip praxis of lust." Her current research focuses on how the contemporary experiences of and oppression of autistic people in the US is part of a much longer history of the co-construction of race and disability as unfit for proper citizenship. Caroline is committed to the transformative and collaborative potential of teaching WGSS 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: gabrielle.mahabeer@emory.edu

Gabby earned their Bachelor of Arts with honors in Anthropology and in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (with a specialization in Caribbean studies) from the University of Chicago, where they held the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship. Their undergraduate thesis, “Ah pretty face and bad character: From Reputation to Radical Care in Dancehall” analyzes dancehall, a working class Afro-Jamaican genre of dance and music, as a queer and womanist practice amidst (post)colonial life in Jamaica. More generally, their research interests include the uses of radical care, cultural politics, and intimate desires in achieving bodily and political sovereignty in and around the Caribbean. Gabby’s research draws on more experimental modalities like creative writing, exhibit curation, and filmmaking.

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: victor.omni@emory.edu

Victor Ultra Omni, a Ph.D. candidate in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University, focuses on the historical origins of New York City's house-structured ballroom culture from 1972 to 1992. Their research has been generously funded by the Society for Visual Anthropology and the Social Science Research Council. 

Victor is a proud father and a co-founder of Emory's Black Feminist Working Group. They employ oral history methods to engage with pioneers of ballroom culture and have published work in journals like Trans Studies Quarterly, Dialogo, The Black Scholar, and the textbook Feminist Studies: Foundations, Conversations, and Applications. Their recent essay titled "Crystal Labeija, Femme Queens, and the Future of Black Trans Studies" can be found in Transgender Studies Quarterly (TSQ) Issue 10 Volume 1.

Email: manjari.sahay@emory.edu 

Manjari’s work lies at the intersection of queer feminist theory, feminist science studies, medical anthropology, and postcolonial studies. Interested in queering reproductive health, she studies discourses of Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS), popularly conceived as a masculinizing disorder of modernization. In 2023, she was awarded the Halle Institute’s Global Perspectives grant for an ethnographic project on gender, nation, and PCOS in India, guided by Dr. Sameena Mulla.

Manjari earned a BA (Honors) in Political Science from Ashoka University and an MSc in Gender, Development, and Globalization from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). She has previously conducted independent research on commercial surrogacy, provided research assistance on books in the fields of WGSS and cultural studies, and written for alternative publications such as Strange Horizons, The Caravan, and Scroll.in.

Website: https://linktr.ee/manjarisahay.

Email: tate.serletti@emory.edu

Tate Serletti (she./they) received their MA in American Studies from Columbia University and is currently working towards her doctorate in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. In their most recent work, Tate uses a critical race and disability studies lens to re-think breathing as an index of capacity and precarity within the context of toxic late liberalism. Tate's work will also be featured in a forthcoming feminist studies textbook under contract with Routledge, titled Feminist Studies: Foundations, Conversations, Applications.

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

Shiv’s work is situated at the intersections of feminist/queer theory, film theory and visual media studies, postcolonial cultural studies, and psychoanalytic criticism. His project reads the fantasy life of politics and its troubled relationship to feminism by analyzing right-wing sexual panics, film, and communal tropos in India. Shiv has a MA in Historical Studies from The New School, and is a past recipient of the Fulbright scholarship (2018). Besides his scholarly pursuits, Shiv has been actively involved in queer feminist advocacy and public education through his work at the Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexuality which he helped set up at Ashoka University, India, in 2015. His most recent scholarly publication appeared in TSQ: https://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article-abstract/10/1/10/357432/Provincializing-Trans-Studies  

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

Email: faizan.tariq@emory.edu

I am an incoming PhD student in the Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies Department at Emory University. I have a BSc in Social Development & Policy from Habib University in Karachi and more recently, I graduated with a Masters in Political Science from New York University. As part of Master's dissertation, I explored the reasons why there has been a backlash in Pakistan against the Transgender Rights Act of 2018, which has most recently been struck down by the country's Federal Shariat Court. Specifically, I was interested in the political economy of HIV/AIDS-prevention NGOs and the class politics that it helped produce, which eventually resulted in a divisive contestation within Pakistan's urban "transgender" Khwaja Sira activist community, over the authenticity of their respective bodies - i.e. real (Muslim/Pakistani/intersex) Khwaja Sira versus fake (Non-Muslim, Westernized, Gay/Transgender) Khwaja Sira, in turn, determining who gets the privileged access to state-granted rights and resources. As part of my Phd Project, I wish to further this research and locate it in a larger geo-political context, whereby Transgender moral panics have gone global, with the rise of fascist right-wing movements from the Anglo-American world to South Asia. My work, therefore, lies at the intersection of post-colonial, feminist and Queer theory, with a focus on exploring how resistance to Western frameworks often devolves into a conservative politics of preserving cultural authenticity in the Global South as well as examining the possibilities and limitations produced by a statist/state-oriented mainstream Queer politics in Pakistan.

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.