Category Archives: News

We invite Northwestern faculty members to submit a proposal to the SPAN Fund for Curricular Innovation as part of SPAN’s new Curricular Fellowship Program. The Sexualities Project at Northwestern (SPAN) is a multi-pronged, critical, and interdisciplinary initiative to promote research and education on sexuality in social context. We are seeking to expand SPAN’s mission to include a curricular component designed to offer courses across a broad range of disciplines to provide undergraduate students with a solid interdisciplinary foundation in sexuality studies. These courses are meant to complement existing offerings in the Gender & Sexuality Studies Program (GSS), as well as to foster links between GSS and departments/programs that have not traditionally co-listed undergraduate courses with GSS.

Each SPAN Curricular Fellow will serve a three-year, non-renewable term. Our goal is to select three SPAN Fellows per year over each of the next three years, for an eventual total of nine Fellows at any given time. Any NU faculty member with a continuing or renewable appointment is eligible to submit a proposal, including professors of instruction.

EXTENDED Deadline: May 29, 2018

Please click here for more information about the SPAN Curricular Fellowship Program.

We’re happy to share the good news that our SPAN postdoc search has now concluded. Our two top candidates have accepted our offers and will be joining us this coming fall.

Scott De Orio received his PhD in History and Women’s Studies in 2017 from the University of Michigan, where he wrote a dissertation entitled “Punishing Queer Sexuality in the Age of LGBT Rights.” He is currently working on a book manuscript bearing the same name that examines the American “war on sex offenders” and its targeting of LGBTQ people. De Orio shines a spotlight on the criminalization of “‘bad’ LGBT subjects”—namely, sex workers, people with HIV, and trans people—in recent decades, ironically during the same period typically thought of as the “age of LGBT rights.” Scott will be affiliated with the Department of History and the GSS program.

Tony Silva will receive his PhD in Sociology from the University of Oregon this spring. He is currently finishing his dissertation, “Bud-Sex: Sexual Flexibility among Rural White Straight Men Who Have Sex With Men.” For a related article, published in Gender & Society, Silva received the 2017 Distinguished Article Award from the Section of Sexualities of the American Sociological Association. His work has received considerable coverage in the media, including in New York Magazine and Psychology Today. Tony will be affiliated with the Department of Sociology and the GSS program.

This year SPAN received 112 applications, which collectively were indicative of the remarkable vibrancy and innovation that mark the field of sexuality studies. Many applicants were top contenders for the fellowship, making us wish we had more fellowships to grant.

Many thanks to our colleagues in GSS who volunteered to be part of our selection committee, and to Eliot for their assistance throughout the selection process.

All best,
Héctor Carrillo and Steve Epstein
Co-Directors, The Sexualities Project at Northwestern (SPAN)

Greetings and welcome to the 2017-18 academic year! We’re proud to report that SPAN is now entering its eighth year of life at Northwestern—in fact, this is the last year of our second phase of funding from Northwestern’s Human Sexualities Endowment. We have already submitted a new proposal for years 2018 to 2021, and we are currently awaiting final approval of our budget from the Provost’s office.

Meanwhile, we are already moving forward with a new search for postdoctoral fellows for 2018-20. If you know any recent PhDs who may be interested, please feel free to send them the link to the call for applications.

This year you can also expect to see all of SPAN’s regular opportunities for graduate students, including dissertation fellowships, funding to present sexuality-related work at academic conferences, and funding to conduct summer research.  Please keep an eye on the deadlines during the year. The first deadline for conference presentations is October 13. We are also planning to hold a faculty-graduate student reading group in the Winter quarter, and our yearly workshop in Spring.

We want to take this opportunity to thank Gregory Ward for his impressive leadership at the helm of SPAN as interim director during our research leave last year. Thanks also to program assistant Eliot Colin for their steady efforts throughout the year, to Amy Partridge and Aaron Norton for coordinating last year’s SPAN reading group, to our postdocs Mitali Thakor and AJ Lewis for helping organize the SPAN workshop, and to the GSS faculty members who served on SPAN selection committees.

We invite you to visit the SPAN website for more information about all our upcoming activities and funding opportunities. Please do check out two new components of our website: Our “Recent publications” page lists recent works by faculty, postdocs, and graduate students who have received SPAN funding. And our “Where are they now?” page lists their current affiliations and other achievements. Congratulations to all of them! We are very pleased that SPAN was able to support their successful and impressive careers! Please email Eliot if you have any publications or other information you would like to add to these pages.

Have a great year, and we look forward to reconnecting with you soon!

All best,

Héctor Carrillo and Steve Epstein
Co-Directors, the Sexualities Project at Northwestern (SPAN)