Last updated Fall 2008
Susan Hardy Aiken (affiliate), University Distinguished Professor of English, has published four books and numerous articles on nineteenth-century British and American Literature and culture, gender studies, and the work of Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen. The recipient of many awards, including Ford Foundation and NEH Fellowships, she was recently honored by inclusion in Feminists Who Changed America (Indiana University Press, 2006). She is currently at work on an archivally-based study focusing on constructions of masculinity and mastery in U.S. antebellum plantation culture.
Maribel Alvarez (executive committee) was awarded a grant of $20,000 from the Ford Foundation to organize and present a conference "No Vale Nada La Vida? La Vida No Vale Nada: Cultural and Political Intersections of Migration and Death in the US Mexico Border". She collaborated with the International Sonoran Desert Alliance (ISDA) in launching the Ajo Memory Project --a 3-year oral history project collecting stories from past residents of the segregated mining company town split into Ajo Townsite, Indian Village, and Mexican Town from 1916 to 1983. The Fall 2008 issue of the Journal of the Southwest contains both an extensive meditative essay and color photo portfolio by Maribel about the border fence that divides Arizona and Sonora, entitled "La Pared que Habla: A Photo Essay about Art and Graffiti at the Border Fence in Nogales, Sonora". She is presently working with retired Rockefeller Foundation Arts and Culture officer Tomas Ybarra-Frausto to design and oversee the formation of a new national grant initiative by NALAC (The National Association of Latino Arts and Culture) entitled "Transnational Cultural Remittances" to distribute $200,000 to grassroots immigrant organizations and artists in the U.S., Mexico and Central America, working on the exchange of cultural knowledge.
Caryl Flinn's (affiliate) main area of research is gender, sexuality, and ideology in film music. In May 2008 she was keynote speaker at the "Utopia of Sound" conference at the Academy of Fine Arts/Austrian Film Museum in Vienna, and in May 2009 she will deliver the keynote at the "Music and the Moving Image" Conference at NYU. Her recent biography, Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (California) has been widely reviewed, from Bookforum to the Advocate, The Tucson Daily Citizen to the New York Times. In March 2008, Caryl spoke to the LGBT Society at San Francisco Public Library re: “Queer Ethel”.
Carol Galper (affiliate) is Assistant Dean for Medical Student Education and Principal Investigator of the Arizona AIDS Education and Training Center. Her focus is on providing HIV and STI related education, technical assistance and capacity building to health professionals and health care organizations to improve the car of patients living with HIV. Her work includes focus on providers in border regions, providers who care for American Indians, HIV testing in labor and delivery settings and developing new providers. New funding has been received from the Arizona Department of Health Services to conduct feasibility studies of implementing HIV testing in Emergency Departments that serve African Americans and surveying men who have sex with men about prevention services. In addition, she teaches medical students about sexual history taking, adolescent sexuality and access to care issues as well as running the Commitment to Underserved People (CUP) service learning program and the Rural Health professions Program. Carol is a faculty advisor to the student Med-Pride group.
Adam Geary (executive committee) specializes in the areas of critical health and AIDS studies, cultural theory, and religious studies. In his research, he analyzes how the sciences of AIDS prevention (psychology, ethnography, epidemiology, etc.) imagine social action and organize therapeutic intervention. He argues that these sciences work together to generate modes of social intervention that approximate forms of religious asceticism. His article "Culture as an object of ethical governance in AIDS prevention," was published recently in the journal Cultural Studies (vol. 21; July/September 2007). Adam is currently at work on a book titled, On the Subject of AIDS: Subjectivity, Neoliberalism, and AIDS Prevention.
Fenton Johnson (executive committee) is nearing completion of his fifth book and third novel, The Man Who Loved Birds. During that time he has also published a number of nonfiction essays, most notably “The Lion and the Lamb,” an adaptation of the 2006 keynote address he delivered at the University of Minnesota’s conference on history and creative nonfiction. He received a 2007-08 Guggenheim Fellowship for support of his nonfiction project Desire in Solitude: A Singular Vocation¸ a critical study of the lives and works of writers and artists who achieved their most significant accomplishments while living alone.
John Paul Jones, III's (affiliate) research is on the geographies of poststructuralist social and cultural theory. He is presently working on theories of immanence and spatial ontology that include ongoing projects on theorizing space in discourses of globalization, and identity. Recent and upcoming publications include The Sage Handbook of Social Geographies (co-edited with Sallie A. Marston, Susan J. Smith, and Rachel Pain). Los Angeles: Sage, forthcoming, 2009, “Post structuralism/Post-structuralist Geographies”, (with Deborah P.Dixon and Keith Woodward), in The International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, Rob Kitchin and Nigel Thrift, eds. London: Elsevier, forthcoming, 2009, “Neoliberal Development through Technical Assistance: Constructing Communities of Entrepreneurial Subjects in Oaxaca, Mexico” (with Margath Walker, Susan M. Roberts, and Oliver Fröhling), Geoforum, Vol. 39, 2008, pp. 527-542.
Miranda Joseph (executive committee) is working on a book-length project entitled A Debt to Society. This project explores modes of accounting—techniques for attributing credits and debts—as they create, sustain or transform social relations. Focusing on financial accounting, juridical accounting (assessment of criminals’ debt to society) and managerial accounting (in public higher education), Joseph asks: what mode of accounting puts people in prison and what alternatives might we offer? How do particular modes of accounting shape time and how do subjects resist neoliberal temporality? And, taking literally the question of what accounts we offer, how do current regimes of accountability and accounting constrain academic knowledge production? She has published an essay from this project, “A Debt to Society,” in The Seductions of Community, edited by Gerald Creed (SAR Press, 2006). Other recent publications include: “Promising Complicities: On the Sex, Race and Globalization Project” (with David Rubin) in A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies edited by George E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry (Blackwell Publishing, 2007); and “The Multivalent Commodity: On the Supplementarity of Value and Values,” in Rethinking Commodification: Cases And Readings In Law And Culture, edited by Martha Ertman and Joan Williams (NYU Press, 2005).
Adela C. Licona (affiliate) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English. Her interdisciplinary research agenda includes and is informed by borderlands rhetorics, third-space theory, Chicana theory, gender studies, documentary film/community media, feminist pedagogies, and community literacies. Her book manuscript Third Space Sites, Subjectivities, and Discourses: Reimagining the Representational Potentials of Borderlands Rhetorics, isa finalist for the SUNY Press Dissertation/First Book Prize in Women’s and Gender Studies, and is being considered for publication by SUNY Press. Her collection, “Feminist Pedagogy: A Retrospective” for the NWSA Journal, (co-edited with Crabtree, R.D., Sapp, D.A.) is forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press in 2009. She is the current president of the National Women's Studies Association Journal (2008-2010).
Eithne Luibhéid's (executive committee) research examines the intersections among sexuality, international migration, and racialization processes in the context of globalization. Recently, she edited a special double issue of GLQ on "Queer/Migration" (Vol. 14 no. 2-3) which was published in April 2008. Featuring essays by both established and emerging scholars, the issue situates queer migration within processes of colonization, globalization, capitalism, nationalism, and slavery."Queer/Migration" has been nominated by Duke University Press for a Council of Editors of Learned Journals award as Best Special Issue. Her “Dialogue” with Bridget Anderson of Oxford University on gender and borders will be published in the September special issue of Re-public, an online bilingual Greek journal. Eithne is continuing work on her book, Sexuality and Sovereignty, which explores how controversies over child-bearing asylum seekers in the Irish Republic have realigned the line between "legal" and "illegal" immigration.
Sallie Marston's (affiliate) work is located at the intersection of socio-spatial theory and the state particularly with respect to political identity. At a theoretical level, she attempts to move toward a greater understanding of the way that space mediates and is mediated by the relationship between politics and culture. Specifically, she has been interested in how the state, or political identities related to the state, are made, remade and transformed in the intimate spaces of everyday life. With co-authors J.P. Jones, III and K. Woodward, she is currently working on a project on spatial ontology and politics. Her recent publications include co-editing (with S. Smith, R. Pain, and J.P. Jones, III) the Sage Handbook of Social Geography and a new edition of her undergraduate co-authored (with P. Knox) textbook, Places and Regions in Global Context: An Introduction to Human Geography. Recent co-authored (with J.P. Jones, III and K. Woodward) articles have appeared in the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Globalizations, and (with V. del Casino) Social and Cultural Geography. She is also, along with co-authors (J.P. Jones, III and K. Woodward), a recent contributor to Cultures of Globalization, Coherence, Hybridity, Contestation, edited by Kevin Archer, M. Martin Bosman, M. Mark Amen, and Ella Schmidt.
V. Spike Peterson (affiliate) is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Arizona, with affiliations in Women's Studies, the Institute for LGBT Studies, and International Studies. She is also an Associate Fellow of the Gender Institute at the London School of Economics. Her most recent book, A Critical Rewriting of Global Political Economy: Reproductive, Productive and Virtual Economies (2003), examines intersections of ethnicity/race, class, gender/sexualities and national hierarchies in the context of neoliberal globalization. She recently published 'Thinking Through Intersectionality and War' in Race, Gender & Class, and '"New Wars" and Gendered Economies' in Feminist Review (both available at http://www.u.arizona.edu/~spikep/ ). She is currently completing a book on informalization, intersectionality, and global insecurities, and with Anne Sisson Runyan preparing the third edition of Global Gender Issues.
Andrea J. Romero (affiliate) is an Associate Professor Mexican American Studies & Research Center. Her research focuses on adolescent health and sources of resiliency in ethnic identity, families, and low-income neighborhoods. Her current research projects involve studies aimed at preventing substance use, and STDs/HIV/AIDS among Mexican American and Native American teens. She has co-written two recent publications that demonstrate that youth who report more stress due to discrimination, prejudice, immigration and acculturation were more likely to report more depressive symptoms and more risky behaviors (Romero, Carvajal, Valle & Orduna, 2007; Romero, Martinez, & Carvajal, 2007). Recent grant submissions aim to build on these findings by proposing HIV prevention and substance use prevention projects that empower ethnic minority youth through increasing resilience to cultural stressors. Upcoming projects will focus on civic engagement and social activism as elements of proactive coping with all types of prejudice, racial, ethnic, and sexual orientation.
Stephen T. Russell's (executive committee) research focuses on adolescent ethnic and sexual identities, sexuality development, and sexual health. He is best known for his work on adolescent sexual orientation, health, and well-being. He has three ongoing funded projects that focus on the health and well-being of LGBT young people, including: a collaboration with the California Safe Schools Coalition to study educational strategies that promote school safety for LGBT high school students, a collaboration with the Cesar Chavez Institute at San Francisco State University to study the role of parent-adolescent relationships in the well-being of LGBT young adults, and a Distinguished Investigator Award from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention for a study aimed at understanding the sexual orientation disparity in adolescent suicide risk. In the past 2 years Stephen has published 6 peer-reviewed articles in the area of LGBT youth and family life, as well as multiple commentaries and publications designed for public dissemination. He is called on as an expert witness for cases involving LGBT students’ rights in public schools, and has been active in advising on safe schools legislation and policy in the state of California and for the National Education Association.
Beverly Seckinger (executive committee) is Professor and Interim Director of the School of Media Arts. Her 2004 documentary Laramie Inside Out is screening this fall at universities, festivals and conferences in Denver, Salt Lake City, Laramie, Milwaukee, Bloomington, Emporia KS, and here in Tucson. Her film is distributed to television worldwide through Filmoption, and is licensed for broadcast on PBS affiliate stations through American Public Television, 2007-2009. Seckinger's feature-length documentary in progress, Hippie Family Values, is supported by a 2008-09 Artist Project Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts ($5,000), and a Research Fellowship from the Hanson Film Institute ($5,000).
Susan J. Shaw (affiliate) is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and a medical anthropologist with research interests in ethnicity, gender and sexuality, health disparities, social movements, and the political economy of health in the United States. She recently received a Hunt postdoctoral fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation to support the completion of her book, Identity, Community and the Governmentality of Primary Health Care in the U.S.
Sandra K. Soto (executive committee) specializes in Chicana/o and Latina/o Literary and Cultural Studies, Queer Theories, and Gender Studies. In Spring, 2008 she was a Research Fellow with the Center for Mexican American Studies and the University of Texas, where she completed her book manuscript, The De-Mastery of Desire: Reading Chican@ Like a Queer (forthcoming with the University of Texas Press). Her recent publications include "Seeing Through Photographs of Borderlands (Dis)Order" (Latino Studies) and "Aztec Queens and Gypsy Kings: Reading Ana Castillo's Eroticized Mestizaje (Critical Essays on Chicano Studies).
In summer 2008, Jennifer Vanderleest (executive committee) mentored faculty from Universidad Nacional de Cordoba who developed the first ever seminar about LGBT health for the National Family Medicine Conference of Argentina. She is co-author and section chief of a $311,000 HRSA grant titled an Adult Disability and HIV Medicine Curriculum for Family Medicine Residents. With funding from the Institute for LGBT Studies, Jennifer is working in collaboration with Stephen T. Russell to prepare a NIH grant on LGBT youth and health risk, especially as it concerns tobacco use. Her chapter, “Models of Health Care for the Homeless” has been accepted for publication in Caring for the Uninsured (Springer: New York and work in progress includes, “Acutely Ill Transgender Men and Women: What Hospitalists Need to Know,” for the Journal of Hospital Medicine. She was recently named the Executive Thread Director of the University of Arizona Medical School curriculum.