Where are they now?

The recipients of SPAN funding have gone on to a wide range of significant activities in the field of sexuality studies. The following sections are organized by the recipients’ positions when they received funding. To learn more about other recipients of SPAN funding, click here.

By position: Faculty | Postdocs | Graduate Students

 

Faculty

  • Michelle Birkett is Assistant Professor in Medical Social Sciences, switching from the research track to the tenure track. She now leads the CONNECT Program at the Institute for Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing (ISGMH). After the SPAN award, she received an NIH Career Development Award focused on understanding network, multilevel, and contextual influences on racial disparities in HIV within young men who have sex with men; and an R01 which is producing a software tool to make it easier for social and behavioral health researchers to collect data on the social networks of vulnerable populations.
  • Jeremy Birnholtz’ article, “Layers of Marginality: An Exploration of Visibility, Impressions and Cultural Context On Geospatial Apps for Men Who Have Sex With Men in Mumbai, India” was published in Social Media + Society 6, which was written with support from a SPAN faculty funding grant.
  • Aymar Jean Christian: Brown Girls, a series released during his second SPAN grant–which funded his analysis of social media and provided support for Open TV (beta)–was picked up by HBO and nominated for an Emmy!
  • Brian Feinstein was recently promoted to Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science.  He and his colleagues have recently published two papers that were based on research conducted with the support of a SPAN faculty research award:
    • Davila, J., Feinstein B. A., Dyar, C., & Jabbour, J. (in press). How, when, and why do bisexual+ individuals attempt to make their identity visible? Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity.
    • Feinstein B. A., Dyar, C., Milstone, J. S., Jabbour, J., & Davila, J. (in press). Use of different strategies to make one’s bisexual+ identity visible: Associations with dimensions of identity, minority stress, and health. Stigma and Health.
  • Bonnie H. Honig is the Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Political Science at Brown University.
  • Erin Moore is Assistant Professor in Anthropology and the History of Medicine at the Ohio State University.  This year, Anthropological Quarterly will publish two pieces Moore has authored as part of a special issue on “Gender Panics in the Global South.” The first is titled “What the Miniskirt Reveals: Sex Panics, Women’s Rights, and Pulling Teeth in Urban Uganda.” The second (with the introduction co-authored with Jennifer Cole) is titled “Gender Panics in the Global South.”
  • Michael Newcomb received tenure at Northwestern University, Department of Medical Social Sciences. He holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.
    He also received two grants from the NIH based on the data collected with his SPAN award.

    • 2016-2021       Principal Investigator, NIAAA, R01AA024065, Efficacy of Couples-Based HIV Prevention in Vulnerable Young Men. This grant seeks to evaluate the efficacy of the 2GETHER HIV prevention program for young male couples by conducted a randomized controlled trial of the program relative to a couples-based positive affect intervention. Total costs: $2,768,934.
    • 2016-2021       Principal Investigator, NIDA, DP2DA042417, A New Approach to Integrating Primary and Secondary HIV Prevention in Young Male Couples. This grant will enhance couples-based HIV prevention programming for young substance-using male couples, including conducting a comparative effectiveness trial the 2GETHER intervention. Total costs: $1,500,000.
  • Christine Percheski recently published a paper with Christina Gibson-Davis in Socius 6:1-17 (2020) entitled “A Penny on the Dollar: Racial Inequities in Wealth among Households with Children”. With Tony Silva (former SPAN Post-Doc), she is also writing a paper currently entitled: “Age-Discordant Partnerships and Their Associations with Sexual Identity, Partnership History, Fertility, and Social Attitudes.”
  • Sarah Rodriguez’sbook The Love Surgeon: A Story of Trust, Harm, and the Limits of Medical Regulation, was published by Rutgers University Press (2020).  Her chapter, “Restoring ‘Virginal Conditions’ and Reinstating the ‘Normal’: Episiotomy in 1920,” appeared in Heterosexual Histories (2021) published by NYU Press. Her recent publications include “Expanding Underrepresented in Medicine to Include Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Individuals,” co-authored with Tim Kelly in Academic Medicine, and “Pregnant Women, HIV, and Clinical Research to Prevent Perinatal Transmission in the 1990s,” in the Journal of Contemporary History. 
  • Steven William Thrasher was awarded a $75,000 Creative and Free Expression grant from the Ford Foundation (Medill press release) and his book, The Viral Underclass: How Racism, Ableism and Capitalism Plague Humans on the Margins, will be published by Macmillan. He is currently finishing the book as he teaches a new class on viruses and the media (Fall Quarter 2020).
  • Mary Weismantel’s latest book, Playing with Things: the Moche Sex Pots, is in press with the University of Texas Press, and will be published in 2021.
  • Emrah Yildiz’ latest book Iranian Pilgrims in Traffic: Religion, Economy and Territory across Borders is in progress, under advance contract with the University of California Press as part of the Atelier: Ethnographic Inquiry in the Twenty-First Century series.
  • Paola Zamperini, in Winter Quarter 2020, taught for the first time a course on the Ming novel Xiyou ji, Journey to the West, as part of the Northwestern Prison Education Program, and hopes to be able to teach it again soon as part of this extraordinary program in the not so distant future. In AY 2020-2021, she will continue her duties as Director of Graduate Studies for GSS and is delighted at having supervised in this role the completion of the GSS graduate handbook, soon to be published online, thanks to the wonderful generosity and leadership of GSS TAs, past and present, and the awesome GSS certificate students. Paola was also selected as SPAN Curricular Fellow (2020-2023), with the project entitled “Global Pornographies: A Transnational Approach,” and has just published “A Family Romance: Specters of Incest in Eileen Chang’s ‘Xinjing” in Prism (2020) 17.1: 1–34, in which she engages the theme of incest in modern and early modern Chinese literature.

Postdocs

 

  • Scott De Orio received his Ph.D. in History and Women’s Studies from the University of Michigan in 2017.   His first book project is called Bad Queers: LGBTQ People and the Carceral State in Modern America (in consideration, University of Chicago Press), examines the creation of a hierarchy of “good” and “bad” LGBTQ people in the American criminal legal system. His second project, The Children’s Crusade: Governing Child Sexuality in the Modern Transatlantic World, examines the construction of a modern system of the regulation and punishment of child sexuality from the Enlightenment to the present. Scott won the Organization of American Historians’ John D’Emilio LGBTQ History Dissertation Award in 2019. His writing has been published in the Journal of the History of Sexuality, Law & Social Inquiry, and the edited collection The War on Sex.
  • Kai M. Green is Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality studies at Williams College in Williamstown, MA.
  • Kirsten Leng was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in September 2019 and is now Associate Professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is currently working on a new book project that examines the history of humor in U.S. feminism, which has been supported by a Faculty Research Grant from UMass Amherst and research grants from UCLA Special Collections, the Getty Research Institute, and Duke University. She recently published new articles from this research project in Feminist Formations and Gender and History (Fumerism as Queer Feminist Activism: Humour and Rage in the Lesbian Avengers’ Visibility Politics, Gender and History 32 no. 1 (March 2020): 108-130).
  • Abram J. (AJ) Lewis is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender, Women’s. and Sexuality Studies at Grinnell College in Grinnell, IA.
  • Aaron Norton is Visiting Assistant Professor in Sociology at Northwestern University.
  • Evren Savciis Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Her book Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam was published by Duke University Press in 2021 and received Honorable Mention for American Sociological Association’s Sex & Gender Section Best Book Award.  Her chapter “Transnational” appears in Keywords in Gender and Sexuality Studies (2021) published by NYU Press.
  • Tony Silva is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia.
  • Mitali Thakor is Assistant Professor of Science in Society at Wesleyan University in Middleton, CT.

Graduate Students

  • Tera Agyepong is Assistant Professor and Director of Pre-Law Concentration and History of Law Minor at DePaul University.
  • Savina Balasubramanian started a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Loyola University Chicago in Fall 2018.
  • Robin Bartram is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Tulane University. Her paper, “Uncertain Sexualities and the Unusual Woman: Depictions of Jane Addams and Emily Dickinson,” was recently published in Social Problems.
  • Karlia Brown received the Alumni Funds Grant from the Northwestern University Sociology Department, as well a SPAN Summer Research Grant.
  • Ivan Bujan organized a workshop co-sponsored by GSS and SPAN entitled “RAGE IS SUSTAINABLE ONLY WHEN SHARED: a workshop for the angry and the hopeful by Charles Long and Theodore Kerr, members of an activist collective What Would an HIV Doula Do?”
  • Teri Chettiar is Collegiate Assistant Professor in History at the University of Chicago.
  • Andrea Christmas received support from from The Sexualities Project at Northwestern, the Buffett Institute for Global Studies, The Graduate School, and the History Department. She presented her research at the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies Conference (Rome, Italy), co-organized an interdisciplinary workshop at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris, France), and guest lectured at the Université de Lille 3 (Lille, France).
  • Marla Clayman is a Senior Researcher at American Institutes for Research, a behavioral and social science research and evaluation organization based in Washington, DC.
  • Beth Corzo-Duchardt is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Media & Communication and Film Studies at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, PA.
  • Maureen Craig is Assistant Professor of Psychology at New York University.
  • Meiver De la Cruz is Visiting Professor of Dance at Oberlin College and Conservatory.
  • Cara Nash Dickason presented work on gender and surveillance in early television at the conferences Console-ing Passions and Film and History, and on girls’ sexual selfies at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and the University of Chicago Cinema and Media Studies conferences.
  • Connor Doak is a Lecturer (equivalent to Assistant Professor) in Russian at the University of Bristol, UK. His research explores Russian literature and culture from the nineteenth century to the present day, with a particular interest in how gender and sexuality are encoded formally in literature, drama and film.
  • Raff Donelson is Assistant Professor of Law and Philosophy at Louisiana State University.
  • Yakir Englander is one of the leaders of Kids4Peace, a grassroots interfaith youth movement dedicated to ending conflict and inspiring hope in Jerusalem.
  • Clare Forstie is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Farmingdale State College.
  • Claudia Garcia-Rojas was awarded an École Normale Supérieure Doctoral Exchange Fellowship for 2017 from the French Interdisciplinary Group at Northwestern University and was named a Northwestern University Paris Program in Critical Theory Fellow.
  • Theodore Greene is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, ME.
  • Kareem Khubchandani is Mellon Bridge Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre, Dance, & Performance Studies and Program in Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Tufts University. Their first book, Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife was published by University of Michigan Press in 2020. Their forthcoming book, Queer Nightlife, co-edited with Kemi Adeyemi and Ramón Rivera-Servera, will be released in 2021.
  • Jeff Kosbie is an associate at Gibbs Law Group LLP where he represents employees harmed by corporate misconduct. He was recently named to the 40 Best LGBTQ+ Lawyers under 40 by the National LGBT Bar Association. He recently published “How the Right to be Sexual Shaped the Emergence of LGBT Rights” in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law.
  • Elias Krell is Assistant Professor of Women Studies at Vassar College.  From 2016-2018, Elias was a César Chávez Postdoctoral Fellow in Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College, and a Consortium for Faculty Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow in Women Studies from 2014-2016 at Vassar College.
  • Alexandra Lindgren-Gibson is a Visiting Assistant Professor in History at Northwestern University.
  • Alyssa Lynne received a Buffett Institute Graduate Student Dissertation Research Award and a SPAN Summer Research Grant in Summer 2017 to conduct ethnographic research with kathoey in Bangkok, Thailand. She presented at the 2018 Engendering Change Conference at University of Chicago and completed her second year paper, entitled, “‘Being You is Not Sick’: (De)medicalization of Thai Kathoey Identity.” Alyssa has also been awarded a Foreign Language and Area Studies Scholarship (FLAS) to study intermediate Thai at the Southeast Asian Studies Summer Institute (SEASSI) during Summer 2018 and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (NSF GRFP) for 2018-2022. She recently had an article published in a special issue of the journal Social Problems focused on the importance of Du Boisian theory in contemporary sociology. It’s entitled “Paired Double Consciousness: A Du Boisian Approach to Gender and Transnational Double Consciousness in Thai Kathoey Self-Formation.”
  • Angela Maione is a Lecturer on Social Studies at Harvard University.
  • Tova Markenson received research support from the American Academy for Jewish Research, the Chicago YIVO Society, the Buffett Institute for Global Studies, the Sexualities Project at Northwestern (SPAN), Northwestern’s School of Communication, and The Graduate School. She presented at the Institute of Art and Performance (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina), and at the Latin American Jewish Studies Association Regional Conference (Columbia University, USA) with support from SPAN. Tova also contributed interviews with former Argentine Yiddish actresses to the Digital Yiddish Theatre Project (DYTP) as a new DYTP member. In the coming academic year, Tova will be a SPAN Dissertation Fellow.
  • Olive Melissa Minor is a Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow and a Research & Evaluation Officer with the International Rescue Committee. She works with IRC’s Research, Analysis, and Learning team to conduct rigorous research, evaluation, and design innovations. Previously, she worked with Oxfam, identifying socio-cultural factors prolonging the Ebola epidemic in Liberia and Sierra Leone; and using anthropology to strengthen humanitarian crisis response in Tanzania.
  • Mollie McQuillan is Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy at UW-Madison. Her work has recently been published in Educational Researcher, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, and West Education Law Reporter.  Her chapter, “Surveying the terrain: Legal and policy contexts” appears in Transgender Studies in K-12 Education: Mapping an Agenda for Research and Practice (2022) published by Harvard Education Press.
  • Bahram Naderil received the Arryman Scholarship from the Indonesian Scholarships and Research Support Foundation, a SPAN Summer Research Grant, a Foster-FAN Summer Research Grant, and a TGS Graduate Research Grant from Northwestern.
  • Lital Pascar received support from Northwestern’s Gender & Sexualities Studies Program, The Sexualities Project at Northwestern, and The Graduate School. She presented her research on consensual non-monogamy at the Rhetoric Society of America’s conference, the National Communication Association conference, and at Console-ing Passions: International Conference on media and Feminism. She participated in panels about teaching and gender at the American Studies Association conference, and at Northwestern’s Graduate Learning and Teaching Symposium. Lital also published a book chapter, “From Homonormativity to Polynormativity: Representing Consensual Non-Monogamy,” in After Marriage: The Future of LGBTQ Politics and Scholarship. Her co-edited Special Issue on “Queer safe Spaces” and an article titled “The Right to Jerusalem:  The Danger of Queer Safe Spaces” were accepted for publication in Borderlands journal.
  • Whitney Pow received a grant from the German Research Foundation to present their invited work at the Queer Temporalities & Media Aesthetics Workshop in Bochum, Germany. Their article, “Reaching Toward Home: Software Interface as Queer Orientation in the Video Game Curtain” was published by the journal The Velvet Light Trap (UT Press). Whitney also presented their work at Backward Glances, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the Screen Cultures Colloquium, the GSS Colloquium, and the JASON National Educators’ Conference.
  • Liz Przybylski is Assistant Professor in Music at University of California-Riverdale.
  • João Queiroga is Assistant Professor in Residence in the Communication Program at Northwestern’s Qatar campus.
  • Shoniqua Roach is Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University. She was recently awarded an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowship for the 2021/22 AY.
  • Ari Shaw is a Senior Fellow and the Director of International Programs at the Williams Institute, specializing in international human rights, LGBTI politics, and U.S. foreign policy.
  • Ryan Stillwagon served as the editorial assistant of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior (2016-17).  Ryan is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of British Columbia
  • Anna Terwiel is Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at Trinity College-Hartford.
  • Alexander Thimons is Adjunct Faculty at DePaul University’s College of Communication.
  • Stefan Vogler is a Research Scientist at NORC at the University of Chicago. His book Sorting Sexualities: Expertise and the Politics of Legal Classification is being published by the University of Chicago Press and will appear in May 2021.
  • Rhaisa Williams is a Assistant Professor of Performing Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.

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