Professor Amina Mama
Professor Amina Mama, widely published and travelled Nigerian/British feminist activist, researcher and scholar, has lived and worked Nigeria, South Africa, Britain, the Netherlands and the USA. She spent 10 years (1999-2009) leading the establishment of the University of Cape Town’s African Gender Institute as a continental resource dedicated to developing transformative scholarship bringing feminist theory and activism together. Founding editor of the continental journal of gender studies, Feminist Africa, her publications include Beyond the Masks: Race, Gender and Subjectivity (Routledge 1995), Women’s Studies and Studies of Women in Africa (CODESRIA 1996), Engendering African Social Sciences (co-edited, CODESRIA 1997) and numerous book chapters and journal articles. Committed to strengthening activism and activist research in African contexts, her research interests include culture and subjectivity, politics and policy, women’s movements and militarism. She and Yaba Badoe co-produced the 50-minute documentary film ‘The Witches of Gambaga’ 2010. She is a Professor and Director of Women and Gender Studies.
Associate Professor Maxine Craig
Maxine Craig is Associate Professor in the Women and Gender Studies Program and Chair of the
Designated Emphasis in Feminist Theory and Research. Her book,
Ain’t I a Beauty Queen? Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Race (Oxford University Press 2002) was the winner of the Best Book of 2002 award on the Political History of Ethnic and Racial Minorities in the U.S by the Organized Section on Race, Ethnicity, and Politics of the American Political Science Association. Following publication of her book she published articles on topics related to embodification of race and gender. Her current research looks at recreational dance to understand the social construction of racialized masculinties. She is active professionally within the field of Sociology and is on the editorial boards of
Gender & Society and of the American Sociological Association’s Rose Book Series.
Associate Professor Elizabeth Constable
Liz Constables's primary research areas focus on late nineteenth-century and twentieth century French and Francophone Cultural Studies and Film. She has published widely in these areas, including articles on Simone de Beauvoir and French women decadent writers. As part of the research work on women and decadence, she co-edited the first bilingual, critical, edition of Rachilde's controversial 1884 novel, Monsieur Venus: A Materialist Novel for the Modern Language Association's Texts and Translations Series in 2004. Her recent research and teaching interests have centered on social affect, and as part of this research, she guest- edited a special issue of the journal, L'Esprit Createur on "States of Shame." Her current research unites and develops these foci (women and decadence, social affect, and the medium of film through a study of the cinema of French director Catherine Breillat for the University of Illinois Contemporary Directors Series).
Professor Wendy Ho
Wendy Ho, Ph.D, is an associate professor with a joint appointment in the Department of Asian American Studies and the Women and Gender Studies Program. She is a faculty member of the Cultural Studies Graduate Program and a number of MRGs in APIA public policy, food politics and performance studies. She has been Chair of the Department of Asian American Studies for six years. She lead the drive toward Departmental status and undergraduate curriculum innovation and increased coordination with campus sites, state, local and cultural community contacts throughout the region. Another of her proudest accomplishments has been developing one of the first Asian American Studies programs and ethnic studies requirements in the Midwest at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and co-founding the Pacific Asian and Women's Alliance, a social and public policy group between the community and University of Wisconsin. She was on the Advisory Boards of the Davis Humanities Institute and the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) and is on the Executive Committee of the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis. She is currently working on a number of institutional cross-disciplinary graduate studies initiatives and transnational collaborations to radically transform educational and pedagogical structures and practices. She is the director of the Asian American Cultural Politics research group that has forefronted speaker series in Critical Race Studies, Asian American Dance and Performance and APIA Sexualities. Her current research focuses on women and gender studies, Asian American studies, feminist theory, Asian American literature and women, literature by women of color, masculinities as well as cultural and food/environmental/sustainability studies. Her first book focuses on the history and literature of Chinese American writers in the United States, especially on the changing formations of gender, family and community. She teaches courses on Intro to Women and Gender Studies, Feminist Theorizing, Asian American Women, Asian American Masculinities, Asian American History and will be teaching a course on Chinese American Experiences and Histories.
Professor Suad Joseph
Most of Dr. Joseph's anthropological field research has focused on her native Lebanon. Her early work investigated the politicization of religious sects in Lebanon leading up to the civil war in 1975, questions of ethnicity and state, local community organization and development. That work led her to consider the impact of women's visiting networks on local and national politics, and the relationships between local communities, community organizations and the state. Evolving from that increasing focus on gender, Joseph developed a long-term research program on the interface of gender, family and state in the Middle East, with a focus on Lebanon, but also carrying out comparative work in Iraq. Central to this research program has been her work theorizing culturally situated notions of "self", "rights", "citizenship" in the context of different political regimes and in the context of the pressures and processes of globalization. She is currently working on three projects: The first is a long-term research project following a cohort of children in a Lebanese village, observing , as they grow, how they learn their notions of rights, responsibilities, nationality, citizenship; how these notions come to be gendered; and how the notions are transferred from family arenas into political/public arenas. The second is a project on transnational Lebanese families, study some of the families from the first project who migrated to the United States and Canada. The third is a media project, critically assessing the representation of Arab and Muslim Americans in major print news media such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. She is the founder of the Middle East Research Group in Anthropology (which evolved into the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association), the Association for Middle East Women's Studies (AMEWS), the Arab Families Research Group; and the American University of Beirut, American University in Cairo, Lebanese American University, University of California, Davis, and Birzeit University Consortium. She has been a faculty at the University of California, Davis since 1976 where she is Professor of Anthropology and Women's Studies, and is founding Director of the Middle East/South Asia Studies Program.
Professor Susan Kaiser
Susan B. Kaiser is Professor of Textiles and Clothing, and Women and Gender Studies, and is a member of the Cultural Studies Graduate Groups at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of The Social Psychology of Clothing: Symbolic Appearances in Context (2nd edition, revised, Fairchild Publications) and over 80 articles in academic journals ranging from Clothing and Textiles Research Journal, Fashion Theory, Cultural Studies, Symbolic Interaction, and Sociological Inquiry to the Journal of Consumer Culture. She is a Fellow and Past President of the International Textile and Apparel Association and serves on the Editorial Board of Fashion Theory. Her current research focuses on fashion theory in conversation with feminist cultural studies, the production-consumption interface in the transnational textile/apparel complex, and (re)constructions of masculinity through style and fashion.
Professor Anna Kuhn
Anna K. Kuhn's research interests include women's literature, feminist theory, film studies and German cultural studies. She teaches the introductory course in Women's Studies and feminist theory the senior seminar. courses on women's literature and film courses in the program. She also teaches courses in the Comparative Literature program.
Professor Luz Mena
Luz Mena is a cultural geographer who specializes in space, race and gender issues, colonial relations, and urban Latin America. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2001. After a two-year UC Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship, she joined the Women and Gender Studies faculty at UC Davis. She teaches courses in historical geography, gender and political conflict, race and space theory, and feminist theory. She has written and lectured on Nineteenth-Century and contemporary Cuba and Central America. Her book manuscript, currently under review, is entitled Reinventing Havana: Free Blacks Transform a City, an exploration of the pivotal role of race and the participation of freed slaves and their descendants in the modernization of Havana.
Professor Kimberly Nettles-Barcelon
Kimberly D. Nettles-Barcelon joined the Women & Gender Studies faculty in 2001. Prior to coming to Davis, she received the Ph.D. in Sociology from UCLA and, subsequently, held a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill and a faculty position at the University of Memphis. Dr. Nettles-Barcelon conducted field research in Guyana with the Red Thread Women's Development Organisation. Based on that research she has written, in her Guyana Diaries: Women’s Lives Across Difference (Left Coast Press, 2008), about Black and East Asian women’s activism in Guyana using a narrative strategy combining ethnography and autobiography. Most recently, Professor Nettles-Barcelon has been active in research on the politics of race, gender and food. She serves as the faculty advisor for the Davis Humanities Institute's Critical Studies in Food and Culture research cluster (
http://people.lib.ucdavis.edu/~davidm/CSFC.html) and is a member of the Multicampus Research Project on Food and the Body (
http://foodandbody.ucdavis.edu/). Additionally, Dr. Nettles-Barcelon is the Social Science Book Review Editor for the journal Food and Foodways (
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/07409710.html). Her current research and teaching interests include issues of critical feminist pedagogy, intersectionality; ethnography, autoethnography, and narrative writing; consumption, authenticity and culinary tourism; feminism and food; women entrepreneurs.
Professor Judith Newton (Emeritus)
Judith Newton is Professor Emerita of Women and Gender Studies. She was the first paid director of the Women and Gender Studies Program at UC Davis and past director of the Consortium for Women and Research. She is the author and editor of five books, the most recent being From Panthers to Promise Keepers: Rethinking the Men's Movement. She is currently finishing a memoir and a book of poetry.
Associate Adjunct Professor Margaret Swain (Emeritus)
Margaret "Peg" Swain (Ph.D. in Anthropology, University of Washington) is Director of the Women’s Resources and Research Center, and Adjunct Associate Professor in Women and Gender Studies. Her first article was on gender and tourism issues, based on doctoral dissertation research with the Kuna in Panama. Some of her later publications include the co-edited books
Gender/Tourism/Fun(?) (2002), and
Explorers and Scientists in China's Borderlands, 1880-1950(In Press); and articles on Cosmopolitanism. She takes a very active part in international academic groups for Tourism Studies (feminist/critical approaches) and Indigenous Peoples of Southwest China. At UC Davis she built the Gender and Global Issues (GGI) program and currently oversees the GGI Post-Baccalaureate in WGS. Her teaching is limited, but she regularly offers an Internship Seminar on feminist ethics in the workplace (WMS 193) out of the Women’s Center, and is developing an on-line course on Niche Tourism. Peg enjoys talking with folks about all this and more.
