Gender and Sexuality Studies Graduate Certificate Students

 

We currently have 42 graduate students pursuing the certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies.

 

Christopher Adamson
Department: English
Degree Objective: PhD

Chris’ research interests revolve around queer aesthetics and poetics, tracing how queer American poetry has evolved from the 19th century to today. He is curious if there is such thing as a traceable poetics of queerness and, if so, how it might be defined.

 

Quinn Anex-Ries
Department: American Studies and Ethnicity
Degree Objective: PhD

Quinn’s work explores the relationship between technology, race, and sex panics in the twentieth- century United States. Most broadly, he investigates the ways that sex and sexuality in the public sphere are constructed and contested through discourses of science and technology, sexual commodification, chemical intervention, domesticity, racialized gender, materiality, and affect.

 

Cruz Arroyo, III
Department: English
Degree Objective: PhD

 

Emma Benayoun
Department: Cinematic Arts (Critical Studies)
Degree Objective: PhD

 

Nicholas Beck
Department: English
Degree objective: PhD

 

Michael Benitez
Department: English
Degree Objective: PhD

Michael’s interests currently entail Shakespeare studies, performance studies, archive studies, and queer theory. Michael’s dissertation examines the intersection of these fields by entertaining the idea that, for Shakespeare, the literary and historical archives had a queer slant: they did not exist exclusively for preservation or erudition, but rather were a more ontologically and temporally malleable entities available for imagination, play, performance, and future revivification.

 

Nicole Bush
Department: American Studies and Ethnicity
Degree Objective: PhD

 

Chris Chien
Department: Communication
Degree Objective: PhD

 

Hayun Cho
Department: East Asian Languages & Cultures
Degree Objective: PhD

 

Athia Choudhury
Department: American Studies and Ethnicity
Degree Objective: PhD

 

Proma Chowdhury
Department: English
Degree Objective: PhD

 

Samantha Cohen
Department: English
Degree Objective: PhD

 

Amy Cruz
Department: English
Degree Objective: PhD

 

Caitlin Joy Dobson
Department: Communication
Degree Objective: PhD

Caitlin's research broadly focuses on power, violence, and trauma to understand the global complexities of gender-based violence. As an anti-violence scholar activist, she is focused under the umbrella of sexual violence on the distinct form of power-based harm known as multiple perpetrator rape. She engages cultural studies, intersectionality studies, and transnational feminism to examine the role of culture in instances of MPR. Through an intersectional and transnational lens, her dissertation project embraces a critical media studies approach to understanding how MPR is depicted through media representations.

 

Sara Fetherolf
Department: English
Degree Objective: PhD

 

Yael Findler
Department: Sociology
Degree Objective: PhD

Yael’s dissertation is about nonprofits that deal with military trauma (including sexual trauma) in Israel and the U.S. and the barriers they face (including constructions of masculinities and other cultural narratives around the soldier/veteran image).

 

Inger Flem Soto
Department: Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture
Degree Objective: PhD

 

Cassandra Flores-Montano
Department: American Studies and Ethnicity
Degree Objective: PhD

 

Jesus Garcia
Department: Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture
Degree Objective: PhD

 

Katie Googe
Department: English
Degree Objective: PhD

 

Alex Hack
Department: Cinema and Media Studies
Degree Objective: PhD

 

Nancy Hernandez
Department: Political Science & International Relations
Degree Objective: PhD

 

Haley Hvdson
Department: Cinema and Media Studies
Degree Objective: PhD

Wielding media studies, abolitionist modalities, Black feminist epistemologies, queer and trans theory, and critical race theory, Haley Hvdson’s work contributes to ongoing critical re-mappings of the carceral geographies of captivity. Their dissertation situates itself in the historical and epistemological gaps between the critical formulations of key terms—presence, visibility, (a)liveness, representation, embodiment, the gaze—shared by Black feminist and media theory respectively to think against and potentiate an abolitionist politics around the infrastructures and onto-epistemologies of video visitation in U.S. carceral spaces and facilities.

 

Meiying Li
Department: Sociology
Degree Objective: PhD

 

Michelle Livings
Department: Population, Health and Place
Degree Objective: PhD

 

Meagan Meylor
Department: English
Degree Objective: PhD

 

Sonia Misra
Department: Critical Studies
Degree Objective: PhD

 

Wakae Nakane
Department: Cinema & Media Studies
Degree Objective: PhD

 

Sabrina Napolitano
Department: English
Degree Objective: PhD

 

Kritika Pandey
Department: Sociology
Degree Objective: PhD

 

Cord-Heinrich Plinke
Department: Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture
Degree Objective: PhD

 

Khaliah Reed
Department: English
Degree Objective: PhD

 

Tisha Reichle - Aguilera
Department: English
Degree Objective: PhD

 

Melissa Rogers
Department: English
Degree Objective: PhD

 

Allison Ross
Department: Cinema and Media Studies
Degree Objective: PhD

 

Jessica Somers
Department: English
Degree Objective: PhD

 

Samuel Teets
Department: English
Degree Objective: PhD

 

Marisa Turesky
Department: Urban Planning and Development
Degree Objective: PhD

 

Elsa Vallot
Department: Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture (French and Francophone Studies
Degree objective: PhD

 

Darby Walters
Department: English
Degree Objective: PhD

 

Melissa Watanabe
Department: Political Science and International Relations
Degree objective: PhD

 

Kayla Wolf
Department: Political Science & International Relations
Degree Objective: PhD

 

  • Gender & Sexuality Studies
  • University of Southern California
  • Mark Taper Hall of Humanities, 422
  • 3501 Trousdale Parkway
  • Los Angeles, California
  • 90089-4352 USA