Graduate Students

 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.

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.

Marley Goldman received her undergraduate degree in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies with highest honors from Emory University in 2024. She is a scholar of queer negativity, drawing upon the theories of Leo Bersani and Michel Foucault in order to explore queerness—not as an identity, but as a dynamic and oblique relationship to legible subjectivity. As an autistic person, horror has been her special interest for over a decade and has now transformed into her central avenue for examining queerness and ontology. Her undergraduate honors thesis read the Cenobites of Clive Barker’s Hellraiser as figures of queer inscrutability, dismantled within the film both physically and subjectively. Her paper presenting body horror as an allegory for the gendered processes inscribed upon adolescent puberty has been published in Swarthmore Crossing. Marley’s dissertation will juxtapose corporeal desubjectification within body horror against the queerness of the horrific inanimate, specifically anthropomorphic objects like the infamous “haunted doll.” 

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.

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.

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.

Siufung received their MPhil in Transgender Studies from The University of Hong Kong. Their research interests include transgender studies, queer theory, Asian studies, sports cultural studies, and feminist ethnography. Their publication critically engages with trans theories, applying them to conceptualize nonbinary identities and bodies that challenge Western binary systems. Siufung's current project explores the implementation of nonbinary gender divisions in bodybuilding in Taiwan.

Outside of academia, they report on trans sports news for Transgriot.com, and their sports activism will be featured in the upcoming documentary “They Are Siufung,” which is set to premiere in Atlanta in 2024.

Website: www.sfunglaw.com 

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.

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.

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.  

victoromni.com

Ris's research analyzes the relationship between scientific knowledge formation and the affective, ontological, and material dimensions of trans life. Their work demonstrates how scientific/biomedical conceptions of sex, gender, and sexuality underly the antagonistic, ontologically circular debate around what trans is and does. Ris's inquiries often engage with Biopolitics to emphasize the tensions that arise from both a reliance on scientific logic for rendering transgender subjects legitimate and legible, and various efforts toward liberation.  

Ris earned a BA in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies from Virginia Commonwealth University and a Master of Public Health from VCU’s School of Medicine. They've previously been published in Annals of Family Medicine; contributed gender affirming health care research to the VCU School of Medicine's orientation programming; and produced a short film centering trans perspectives in the outdoors—partnered with​ Eddie Bauer and Emerging Earth Films. They welcome further opportunities for collaboration with medical practitioners, scholars, and artists.

 Email: manjari.sahay@emory.edu

 Email: shiv.datt.sharma@emory.edu

Shiv’s work is situated at the intersections of feminist/queer theory, film theory and visual media studies, cultural studies, and psychoanalytic criticism. His dissertation is a sustained inquiry on films by the renowned Indian filmmaker Sanjay Leela Bhansali, in relation to questions of (collective) fantasy, form, historical memory, and sexuality. Shiv has a MA in Historical Studies from The New School, and is a past recipient of the Fulbright scholarship (2018). 

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

Tavia received her BA in Communication Studies with a minor in African American Studies in the fall of 2020 and a MA in Women’s Studies in the spring of 2024 from the University of Alabama. Tavia coined the term “silent diaspora,” a signal she described as a “longing” for an end to the sexually violent conditions she recognized Black women authors, particularly Gayl Jones in Corregidora, engaged with in her novel written about the Southern Black experience. Tavia’s plan is to expand on the political implications that Black feminist literature explores with narrative, time, and subjectivity by researching the archives of novelist Alice Walker to help ask and answer the transcendence of the Black female psyche during girlhood into their realities.

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.