Faculty Affiliated with LGBTS

* Member of the 2011-12 LGBTS Committee

Click here for a full listing of Yale Faculty teaching in and affiliated with the Program of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

GerShun Avilez* is an Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies.  He writes about and teaches courses on African-American literature, visual art, and cultural criticism.  He is interested in the relationship between aesthetic strategies and legal and political discourses in contemporary African-American expressive culture. His current book project is a study of the artistic and critical legacies of the Black Arts Movement.  The question of how considerations of gender expression and sexual identity inform artistic production motivates much of his work.  In his scholarship and teaching, he is committed to studying a wide variety of art forms, including: drama, fiction, non-fiction, film, poetry, visual and performance art, comic strips, and ethnography.  His published work appears in the journals African American Review and Callaloo and the critical collection Representing Segregation.

Melanie Boyd* teaches and writes about literature, politics, and feminist and queer theory.  She is particularly interested in the rhetorical deployment of suffering—in the use of victimhood as central site from which to articulate political and ethical imperatives, and in the flows of agency around and through such intimate articulations.  She is currently completing a monograph entitled Unsettling Intimacy: Feminist Victimhood in the Aftermath of Sentimentality on affect, agency, and address in feminist narratives of father-daughter incest.  She is also in the early stages of a project on feminist testimonial politics as they play out within transnational human rights discourses.  In her capacity as Special Advisor, she works with the Dean’s Office on a range of projects to make Yale College an invigorating, supportive place for undergraduates of all genders; she is also the advisor to the student-run Women’s Center.  She holds a BA in Women’s Studies from Yale, an M.A. in Women’s Studies from Emory, and a PhD in English and Women’s Studies from the University of Michigan. In the fall of 2011, Melanie was appointed Associate Dean of Student Affairs in Yale College.

George Chauncey* is Professor of History and American Studies and chair of LGBT Studies. He is the author of Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (1994) and Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today's Debate over Gay Equality (2004), and the co-editor of Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (1989) and of a special issue of GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies on "Thinking Sexuality Transnationally" (1999). His most recent article, in which he reflects on his involvement as a professional historian in ten gay rights legal cases, is "How History Mattered: Sodomy Law and Marriage Reform in the United States," Public Culture (2008). He is currently completing a book on The Strange Career of the Closet: Gay Culture, Consciousness, and Politics from the Second World War to the Gay Liberation Era. He regularly teaches a fall lecture course and a spring junior seminar on LGBT history as well as graduate courses on the history of sexuality. With Joanne Meyerowitz, he is co-director of the Yale Research Initiative on the History of Sexualities.

Joseph W. Gordon* is the Dean of Undergraduate Education in Yale College. He is responsible for academic planning and review, including the procedures by which programs and courses are added to the curriculum. He has taught courses in 19th- and 20th-century British literature at Yale since 1976. He earned a bachelor's degree from Amherst College and the Ph.D. in English from Yale. From 2000-2003, he served as the national president of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, America's oldest undergraduate honor society, and continues to serve on its national Executive Committee. He has a passion for all things Spanish (except jamón), operatic, or canine.

Ron Gregg* is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies and Director of Film Programming at the Whitney Humanities Center. He teaches courses on queer cinema (both Hollywood and avant-garde) and has published articles on topics ranging from MGM's management of the image of its 1920s gay star William Haines to queer representation in the competing videos produced during Oregon's 1992 anti-gay rights ballot measure campaign. He regularly brings filmmakers to campus, including Jonathan Caouette, Barbara Hammer, José Rodriquez-Soltero, Jim Hubbard, and Cecilia Doughtery, and he chairs the FLAGS Film Committee, which selects films to be purchased for the Film Studies Center. In 2009 he co-organized a conference on Postwar Queer Underground Cinema, 1950-1968. He has curated film and video programs for the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, the South African Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Chicago's Gerber-Hart Gay and Lesbian Library, and several universities.

Inderpal Grewal* is Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Most recently she has taught at University of California, Irvine, where she was director of Women’s Studies and of the PhD Program in Culture and Theory. Her research interests include transnational feminist theory; gender and globalization, human rights; NGO’s and theories of civil society; theories of travel and mobility; South Asian cultural studies, and postcolonial feminism.  She is the author of Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire and the Cultures of Travel (Duke University Press, 1996) and Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms (Duke University Press, 2005), and (with Caren Kaplan) has written and edited Gender in a Transnational World: Introduction to Women’s Studies (Mc-Graw Hill 2001, 2005) and Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational: Feminist Practices (University of Minnesota Press, 1994). Currently she is working on a book length project on the relation between feminist practices and security discourses. She is also co-editing (with Victoria Bernal, UC Irvine, Anthropology) an edited collection entitled “The NGO Boom: Critical Feminist. Practices.” Inderpal is currantly the Chair of the Yale Program in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

Margaret Homans is Professor of English and of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She currently serves as Director of Graduate Studies for WGSS at Yale and as President of the International Society for the Study of Narrative. She has published widely on feminist and queer theory and on British and U.S. women writers. Her books include Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing (1986) and Royal Representations: Queen Victoria and British Culture, 1837-1876 (1998), and she is the editor of Virginia Woolf: A Collection of Critical Essays (1993). Her essays include “Amy Lowell’s Keats: Reading Straight, Writing Lesbian” and “‘Racial Composition:’ Metaphor and the Body in the Writing of Race.” She teaches courses on Virginia Woolf, feminist literary criticism, and the intellectual history of feminist and queer theory. Her current project is a book on adoption that investigates how adoption asks questions about normative ideas of family and identity; she also teaches a course on adoption narratives.

Marcus Hunter* Assistant Professor of Sociology, received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Northwestern University in 2011. His research and teaching pursuits are driven by an interest in examining, analyzing, and uncovering how and why particular inequities exist and in what ways place, race, and the agency of urban blacks facilitate and/or mitigate such inequities. His current book project, tentatively entitled Living for the City: Race, Agency and Politics in Urban America, explores how the agency and heterogeneity of urban black residents influences patterns of urban and neighborhood change over the course of the 20th Century, focusing in particular on the socio-political history of Philadelphia's 7th Ward—the black neighborhood immortalized in W.E.B. DuBois's The Philadelphia Negro (1899). His research has benefited from grants from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. In addition, Hunter’s research on urban black life has been featured in the journals City & Community and Sexuality Research & Social Policy.

Marianne LaFrance* is Professor of Psychology and of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and served as Chair of LGS Studies at Yale from 2000-2007.  As a research psychologist she studies how gender is behaviorally acquired and "performed" (e.g., via facial expression, body movement, vocalization); how gender and sexuality are understood by lay people as immutable essences or fluid responses and how these construals affect attitudes and support for social policy; and the consequences of subtle sexual harassment. She has published extensively in scientific journals and her forthcoming book is Lip Service: The Psychology Behind the Smile.  She teaches courses on The Psychology of Gender and Gender Images in the Media. She also runs a research lab for advanced undergraduates and graduate students called Gender Lab.  Her current research centers on examining the nature and effects of sexual objectification.

Kathryn Lofton is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Religious Studies.  Her research focuses on the intersection of religious innovation, consumer culture, and the modern imaginary.  A specialist in nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. religious history, she has published on the evangelical preacher, theological modernism, civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, soap advertisements, and the religious meanings of Oprah Winfrey's multimedia empire.  Her first book, Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon, is forthcoming from the University of California Press.  She is currently working on her second monograph, The Modernity in Mr. Shaw: Modernisms and Fundamentalisms in American Culture, which examines the formation of sexual identity through the life of one Presbyterian fundamentalist, John Balcom Shaw (1860-1935), an editor of The Fundamentals who was remitted from the ministry following accusations of sodomy in 1918. At Yale, she teaches courses on modern American religion, religion and sexuality, religion and popular culture, and methods and theories for the study of religion.

Barry McCrea is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, with a secondary appointment in English. He has a B.A. in French and Spanish from Trinity College Dublin, and a Ph.D. from Princeton (2004). He has recently finished a book manuscript entitled Family and the Modern Novel, with chapters on Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce, and Proust, which links the evolution of modernist narrative form in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to a changing, non-genealogical conception of the family. He is the author of a number of articles on family and queerness in modern narrative. At Yale he teaches courses on modern European and Latin American literature in English, French, Italian, Spanish and Irish (Gaelic). His novel, The First Verse, won the 2005 Ferro-Grumley prize for gay fiction, was selected for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program, and was nominated for an American Library Association Stonewall award and for a Lambda award. It was published in Spanish as Literati and in German as Die Poeten der Nacht.

Kobena Mercer* writes and teaches on the visual arts of the black diaspora, examining African American, Caribbean, and Black British artists in modern and contemporary art. His courses and research address cross-cultural aesthetics in transnational contexts where issues of race, sexuality, and identity converge. 

His first book, Welcome to the Jungle (1994), introduced new lines of inquiry in art, photography, and film, and his work features in several interdisciplinary anthologies including Art and Its Histories (1998), The Visual Culture Reader (2001) and Theorizing Diaspora (2003). Mercer is the author of monographic studies on Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Isaac Julien, Renee Green, and Keith Piper, as well as historical studies of James VanDer Zee, Romare Bearden, and Adrian Piper. He is the editor of the Annotating Art’s Histories series, published by MIT and INIVA, whose titles are Cosmopolitan Modernisms (2005), Discrepant Abstraction (2006), Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures (2007), and Exiles, Diasporas & Strangers (2008).Newly appointed to the Departments of the History of Art and African American Studies at Yale University, Mercer previously taught at New York University and University of California at Santa Cruz. An inaugural recipient of the 2006 Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing awarded by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Massachussetts, he is currently working on an essay collection, Travel & See: Writings on Black Diaspora Art, and will contribute a chapter to The Image of the Black in Western Art: Volume V, The Twentieth Century (Harvard University Press).

Liz Montegary* recently received her Ph.D. in Cultural Studies, with designated emphases in Critical Theory and Feminist Theory and Research, from the University of California, Davis. Her dissertation, “Queer Mobilizations: The Transnational Circuits of U.S. Lesbian and Gay Politics,” examines the history of lesbian and gay travel during the twentieth century in order to illustrate how global networks of exchange have shaped lesbian and gay activism in the U.S. She holds an M.A. in Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers University, and she has taught courses in gender and sexuality studies at the College of New Jersey, Rutgers University, and UC Davis. Her current research interests include feminist, queer, and postcolonial theory; transnational American studies; gender, militarization, and war; histories of travel and tourism; and mobility, dis/ability, and the body.

Joanne Meyerowitz is professor of History and American Studies. She has published widely in the history of gender and sexuality. Her book How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (2002) won the Stonewall Book Award of the American Library Association and the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award for GLBT nonfiction. She is also the author of Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880-1930 (1988) and the editor of Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960 (1994). Her current project examines theories of human difference in mid-twentieth-century social thought. Before she came to Yale in 2004, she taught at Indiana University and the University of Cincinnati and also edited the Journal of American History. With George Chauncey, she co-directs the Yale Research Initiative on the History of Sexualities.

Karen Nakamura, a cultural and visual anthropologist whose research focuses on disability and minority social movements as well as gender and sexuality in contemporary Japan, is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and East Asian Studies. Her ethnography Deaf in Japan: Signing and the Politics of Identity (2006) won the John Whitney Hall Book Prize from the Association of Asian Studies. Her articles include "Female masculinity and fantasy spaces: transcending genders in the Takarazuka theatre" (co-authored with Hisako Matsuo) in Men and Masculinities in Contemporary Japan: Dislocating the Salaryman Doxa, ed. James Roberson and Nobue Suzuki. Recently she has been engaged in a new comparative project on disability politics in the United States and Japan. She has served on the editorial board of the American Anthropologist and is soon finishing a three-year term as an elected member of the AAA Minority Issues in Anthropology Commission. Her courses include "Queer Ethnographies" and "Minorities and Sexualities in Modern Japan."

Sally M. Promey is Professor of American Studies, and Deputy Director and Professor of Religion and Visual Culture, Yale Institute of Sacred Music. She holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Religious Studies. She directs the Yale Initiative for the Study of Religion and Visual Culture, and she is also one of three principal investigators for the Women, Religion, and Globalization Project. Her scholarship explores visual and material cultures of religions in the United States. She is author of two award-winning books, Painting Religion in Public: John Singer Sargent's "Triumph of Religion" at the Boston Public Library (1999) and Spiritual Spectacles: Vision and Image in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Shakerism (1993), as well as contributing author and co-editor of The Visual Culture of American Religions (2001). Her current research interests include the public display of religion in the United States from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first, American religious liberalism, and visual controversy and censorship, especially as elicited in relation to religion, sexuality, and the politics of vision.

Sam See is Assistant Professor of English and works primarily on British and American modernist literature and sexuality studies, although he also studies transatlantic literature from the late nineteenth century through the present. His first book project explores how British and American modernist writers co-opted the evolutionary precepts of degeneration theory to depict queer feeling as natural: material but nonetheless subject to change. His next book project will examine how British and American writers throughout the twentieth century used aesthetics like the mythical method and magic realism to create queer mythologies that depict the construction of transhistorical and transnational queer communities. These projects, and the essays that he has published on queer literature, reflect his abiding interest in the questions that aesthetic and sexual feeling present for literary historiography. At Yale, he teaches courses in twentieth-century British and American literature and sexuality studies, with particular emphases on the relationships between these fields and science, visual art, and aesthetic theory.

Emilie M. Townes is the Associate Dean of Academic Affairs and Andrew W. Mellon Professor of African American Studies and Religion in the Divinity School.  She has appointments in African American Studies, Religious Studies, and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.  Her teaching and general research interests focus on social ethics, womanist ethics, critical social theory, cultural theory and studies, as well as on postmodernism and social postmodernism. Her specific interests include health and health care, the cultural production of evil, and developing a network between African Americans and Afro-Brasilian religious and secular leaders and community-based organizations. She is the first Black woman to serve as president of the American Academy of Religion (2008) and was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009.

John Treat * is a professor of modern Japanese and Korean literary and cultural studies and chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures. He has also taught at the University of Washington, Berkeley, Stanford, Texas, and Seoul National.  He is the author of, among other books, Great Mirrors Shattered: Japan, Orientalism, and Homosexuality (Oxford UP, 1999). Professor Treat is currently the Chair of LGBT Studies at Yale.

Maria Trumpler* received her PhD from Yale in History of Medicine and Life Science in 1992.  Her interests include gender and science, feminist critiques of science, scientific studies of sexuality, and food studies.  She has taught at Yale, Middlebury and Harvard, and currently teaches a lecture course on “Women, Food and Culture” and a first year seminar on “History of Sexuality.”  She also serves as Director of Yale’s new Office of LGBTQ Resources.

Michael Warner is Seymour H. Knox Professor of English and American Studies and Chair of the Department of English, with diverse interests in colonial and antebellum America, social theory, media studies, queer theory and politics. He is currently at work on a study of secularism, including the theoretical understanding of secularism in the present, a historical inquiry into the development of secularism in America, and reflection on the relations between sexuality and secularity. With Craig Calhoun and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, he is coediting a volume titled Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age. Among his other books are The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (1990); Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory (1993); The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (1999); American Sermons (1999); Publics and Counterpublics (2002); The Portable Walt Whitman (2003); and with Myra Jehlen, The English Literatures of America, 1500-1800 (1997).

Timothy Young* is Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library focusing on fields of research related to modern literary and cultural movements, especially the avant garde, and visual culture. He currently is working to expand the library's collections in GLBTQ literature and culture as well as the broader field of human sexuality, with collections of manuscripts and books ranging from life histories, magazines, and erotica to Tijuana bibles. Other fields that he oversees include: financial history, comics and illustration, playing cards and games, sporting history and children's literature. He is the author of Drawn to Enchant: Original Children's Book Art in the Betsy Beinecke Shirley collection (2007) and My Heart in Company: The work of J.M. Barrie and the birth of Peter (2005). He holds a degree in English and French literature from the University of Tulsa and one in Library Science from the University of Texas at Austin.