Faculty

Julia S. Jordan-Zachery is professor and chair of the Women’s Gender and Sexualtiy Studies Department at Wake Forest University. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on African American women and public policy. She is also the author of the award winning books Black Women, Cultural Images and Social Policy (2009 Routledge) and Shadow Bodies: Black Women, Ideology, Representation, and Politics (Rutgers University Press, 2017) as well as a number of articles and edited volumes including Black Girl Magic Beyond the Hashtag: Twenty-First-Century Acts of Self-Definition (University of Arizona Press, 2019). Jordan-Zachery was awarded the Accinno Teaching Award, Providence College (2015-2016). Jordan-Zachery serves as the President of the Association for Ethnic Studies.

Tivia Collins holds a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Gender Studies from the University of the West Indies. Her research and teaching centres black transnational and diasporic feminisms, postcolonial feminist studies, citizenship studies and Caribbean feminist praxis. Her current research focuses on migrant women’s lived experiences of borders, citizenship and non/belonging. Tivia’s peer reviewed articles have appeared in Migration and Development, and Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography. She is currently a member of The MenEngage Alliance Youth Reference Group, a global network working to transform patriarchal masculinities, and serves on the advisory board for FeminiTT, a Caribbean-feminist collective geared towards advancing Gender Justice in the Caribbean.

J. Joy Davis, MBA is a multidisciplinary academician whose scholarship intersects women’s studies, urban education, and business. Davis, a distinguished Holmes Scholar, is obtaining a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction (Urban Education) with a Graduate Certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her research centers on high-achieving Black Female Collegians and their academic experiences from an equity lens and critical race feminism pedagogy. Davis’ two most recent research contributions were published in Films as Rhetorical Texts: Cultivating discussion about race, racism, and race relations” by Lexington Books (2020) and an upcoming anthology, Mamas, Martyrs and Jezebels published by Black Lawrence Press (2024).

Kristina Gupta is an Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Wake Forest University. Her research and teaching interests are in the areas of sexuality studies, feminist theory, feminist studies of science and medicine, and disability studies. She teaches courses such as “Sexual Politics in the U.S.,” “Gender and the Politics of Health,” and “Men, Masculinity, and Power.” She is currently working on a book project about asexuality, compulsory sexuality, and science. Her first book, Medical Entanglements: Rethinking Feminist Debates about Healthcare (Rutgers University Press, 2019), uses intersectional feminist, queer, and crip theory to move beyond “for or against” approaches to medical intervention . She is also a co-editor of Queer Feminist Science Studies: A Reader (The University of Washington Press, 2017). Her articles have been published in Signs: The Journal of Women in Culture and Society, the Journal of Medical Humanities, the American Journal of Bioethics: Neuroscience, the Journal of Lesbian Studies, and Feminism & Psychology, among others.

Dr. Jackie Krasas is the Dean of the College and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Wake Forest University since July 1, 2023.

Dean Krasas received her undergraduate degree with honors in Social Relations from Lehigh University, and both her master’s degree and Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Southern California with concentrations in Gender Studies, Organizations, and Work. At Penn State University, she was a faculty member for 10 years in the Department of Labor Studies and Industrial Relations, where she played a key role in the development of graduate education. In 2005, Dr. Krasas returned to her alma mater, Lehigh University, where she served as the Director of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies for almost a decade. She then served for six years as the inaugural Associate Dean for Interdisciplinary Programs and International Initiatives, working with directors of more than 20 interdisciplinary programs to improve interdisciplinary structures, collaborations, and education at the university. In 2020, Dr. Krasas was promoted to Deputy Provost for Faculty Affairs, where among her many accomplishments, she guided faculty-related COVID policies, implemented new term faculty ranks, and revised the triennial review process in addition to leading and implementing a university-wide faculty salary equity review and subsequent salary adjustments.

Throughout these appointments, Dr. Krasas has shown extensive academic administrative experience in operations and leadership including curricular development, faculty development, strategic planning, budget and resource management, fundraising and alumni relations, and faculty hiring, retention, promotion, and tenure.

Dr. Krasas’ scholarship on social inequalities includes contingent and temporary work; sexual harassment; women in STEM; work and family; and motherhood. In addition to her peer-reviewed articles appearing in top journals, such as Gender & Society and Work and Occupations, she published two books. Her first book, Temps: The Many Faces of the Changing Workplace (Cornell/ILR Press, 2000) was one of the first to analyze both the structure of power and the meaning of temporary employment across different occupational contexts. Her most recent book, Still a Mother: Noncustodial Mothers, Gendered Institutions, and Social Change (Cornell University Press, 2021), sheds light on the challenges of contemporary motherhood through the lens of noncustodial mothers’ experiences as they navigate a set of gendered social institutions including employment, education, health care, and the legal system. Dr. Krasas was also the co-PI of Lehigh University’s five-year, $2.6 million NSF ADVANCE Institutional Transformation Grant, “Building Community Beyond Academic Departments,” and co-led their membership in the Aspire IChange Network of the NSF Aspire Alliance.

In addition to her work as Dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Dr. Krasas also holds a faculty appointment as Professor with the Department of Women’s Gender, and Sexuality Studies. In this role, she continues her more than two decades of experience teaching classes in sociology and gender studies, from introductory courses to graduate-level instruction on social and feminist theory, workplace inequalities, and research methods.

Khaliah Reed is an assistant professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Southern California. Her scholarship and teaching coalesce around fan studies with an emphasis on fanfiction, contemporary African American women’s digital praxis, and marginalized Black literary audiences and culture—all engaged through the lens of Black feminist and queer theory. Her current research focuses on the intersections of Black women, shame, respectability, and fanfiction. Her work has been published in The Journal of Creative Writing Studies.

Meghan Boone teaches and researches on topics related to the state regulation of the physical body, often focusing on the rights of pregnant, birthing, and parenting individuals. Because of her deep and expansive research focus, Professor Boone is considered an expert on matters related to lactation law, reproductive rights, family law, and gender equality in the workplace, among other timely topics. In 2020, she was named the winner of the American Association of Law School (AALS) Scholarly Papers Competition for her George Washington University Law Review article, “Reproductive Due Process.”

Professor Boone comes to Wake Forest School of Law after serving as an assistant professor at the University of Alabama School of Law. From 2016-2018, she was a visiting professor of law at Wake Forest Law, where she taught civil procedure and other subjects. Professor Boone is also a former Clinical Teaching Fellow for the Institute for Representation at Georgetown University Law Center.

Dr. Rian Bowie is an Associate Teaching Professor with Wake Forest University’s Department of English.  Her academic areas of interest include 19th and 20th Century African-American Literature, 19th Century American Women’s Social Movements, 19th/Early 20th Century African-American and American Periodicals and American Political Satire.

Michaelle Browers is professor of Politics and International Affairs and directs the Middle East and South Asia Studies Program and the Arabic Program at Wake Forest University. She is author of Political Ideology in the Arab World: Accommodation and Transformation (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Democracy and Civil Society in Arab Political Thought: Transcultural Possibilities (Syracuse University Press, 2006), and has edited (with Charles Kurzman) a book, entitled An Islamic Reformation? (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). Her articles have appeared in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Journal of Political Ideologies, Critical Review of Social and Political Philosophy, Theory and Event, and Third World Quarterly. She is currently completing a book length history of Arab political thought since World War II.

Simone M. Caron joined the history faculty at Wake Forest University in 1991 and was chair of the department from 2005 to 2013. They were also chair of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies from 2018-2021. Their research interests span from 1830 to the present and include American medical history, reproductive issues (birth control, abortion, sterilization), midwifery, alcoholic women, unwed mothers, and infanticide.  Their teaching interests center on gender and medical history; race, gender and the law; the Great Depression; the long decade of the Sixties; and American political, social, economic and cultural history since 1865.  They received the ODK Award for Contribution to Student Life (1994), the Reid-Doyle Prize for Excellence in Teaching (1995),  the Jon Reinhardt Prize for Excellence in Teaching (2014), and the Donald O. Schoonmaker Faculty Award for Community Service (2018).

Dr. Gómez Cervantes’ research interests include immigration, immigration policies, race/ethnicity, gender, Latina/x/os, and families. In her current book project, Illegality in the Heartland, she investigates the effects of immigration policies on Latin American immigrants’ everyday lives and ethnoracial relations among Latin American immigrants. Dr. Gómez Cervantes is a University of California President’s Fellow, a Ford Fellow, and an American Sociological Association Minority Fellow. Her research has received support from the National Science Foundation. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Kansas in 2019.  Her work appears in Social Problems, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Migration Letters, Sociology Compass, and Feminist Criminology.

Megan Francisco holds a PhD in musicology from the University of Washington where her research drew on film, race, and gender theories to analyze Battlestar Galactica‘s landmark science fiction score. She has an article published by the Journal of the Society for American Music on opera and Battlestar Galactica. Beyond film, Megan wrote her master’s thesis on the symphonies of Gustav Mahler and is currently writing the chapter on the composer’s US reception for Leonard Bernstein in Context (Cambridge University Press). Prior to the University of Washington, she received a master’s in religion and music from the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.

Dr. Gao (B.A. University of Hong Kong, M.A. Columbia University, Ph.D. University of Kansas) teaches East Asian Art at Wake Forest. Her research fields include intersections of natural history and pictorial arts, book culture, and women artists. Her current project examines the social history of materia medica images in the Ming dynasty of China (1368-1644). In addition to her specialty in painting history, Dr. Gao is also interested in Japanese prints, Chinese bronze culture, and interregional transmissions of art within and beyond East Asia. Her research has been supported by the Bei Shan Tang Foundation, the Metropolitan Center for Far Eastern Art Studies, the Getty Foundation, and the Hall Center for Humanities.

Dr. Rebecca Gill (Ph.D., University of Utah) is the LeAnne E. Merlo Presidential Chair in Communications and Entrepreneurship at Wake Forest University. Her research is centered on organizational and occupational identity, with particular attention to entrepreneurial identity and how it is shaped alongside social identities, place, and culture. Gill’s recent scholarship examines the various elements of identity that may be involved in the formation of regional innovation ecosystems, and the implications thereof. She teaches courses that address entrepreneurial storytelling; entrepreneurial organizing; and critical theory. Her work has been published in several top tier journals, including Communication Monographs, Communication Theory,Human Relations, Management Communication Quarterly, and Organisation.

Dr. Timothy Gitzen is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Wake Forest University. Broadly, his research focuses on the intersections of security, queer politics, surveillance, viruses, and social justice in South Korea. His newer research concerns queer youth sexuality and sex education in the United States.

Timothy’s research concerns the ways national security has been mobilized against queer folks in South Korea. It examines the ways this came to be, starting with the cultivation of national security primacy during the Cold War and the North Korean threat. He traces how policies and laws targeting the influence and threat of North Korea and communism came to include the targeting of marginalized populations, most notably queer folks. In addition to tracing this process in multiple settings, he explores how queer folks also participate in their own securitization and security making as attempts to be included in the national citizenry. He argues that by participating in their own securitization, queer folks are both placating to patriarchal and national authority that is responsible for their continued marginalization while also carving out spaces of endurance from within securitization practices and technologies. The forms of queer endurance he examines thus become immanent to security itself, challenging not only the contours of national security in South Korea, but global iterations and entanglements of security writ large.

In collaboration with a colleague in South Korea, Timothy is also working on a multi-faceted project that interrogates South Korea’s Covid-19 response, expansion of surveillance technologies, and the effects these have on queer folks. It specifically examines the mass surveillance technologies and techniques that deliberately target the non-normative behaviors, lifestyles, and practices of Koreans. These technologies include mandatory testing, collecting financial data, mapping social media data, tracking mobile phone GPS, and reporting the details of infected individuals to the public. This project thus details how queer folks navigate heightened surveillance practices—especially in the wake of a May 2020 outbreak within gay bars and clubs—alongside their navigation of the viral pandemic.

At Wake Forest, Timothy will begin a new project on queer youth sexuality and sex education, focusing specifically on college students in the United States. This research will track the informal networks, mechanisms, and practices college students use—and have used since high school—to learn about sex and sexuality. In particular, Timothy will explore how queer college students use technology, popular culture, and other avenues to not only learn how to be queer, but to cultivate subjectivities, relationships, and identities amidst a significant dearth of queer-affirming sex education in schools.

Timothy’s research has been published in a variety of publications—Cultural Studies, positions: asia critique, and Sexuality and Culture, to name a few—and has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Korea Foundation, the Academy of Korean Studies, and the University of Hong Kong’s Society of Fellows in the Humanities.

Melissa Harris-Perry is the Maya Angelou Presidential Chair at Wake Forest University in the Department of Politics and International Affairs, the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and the Program in Environment and Sustainability. Melissa is founder and president of the Anna Julia Cooper Center, an independent organization advancing justice through intersectional scholarship and action. Along with Dorian Warren, Melissa co-created and co-hosts System Check. She is currently serving as interim host of The Takeaway from WNYC public radio. Melissa is an award-winning author, sought after public speaker, and accomplished media professional.

I am a cultural historian of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain and the British Atlantic world, and I’m especially interested in material and visual culture, print and ephemera, politics, and gender in the early modern period. I received my PhD from Indiana University in 2013, and I was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of the Material Text in the History Department at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Dr. Vivian A. Laughlin is a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Classics at Wake Forest University. She is a broadly trained Archaeologist and Anthropologist of the Western Asia, Northern Africa, and Western European regions. Her research and interests hone the geographical receptions and transformations derived from North Africa, specifically ancient Egypt, that became wide-spread during the Hellenistic and Roman periods in lands located East and West of the Mediterranean. She was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Scholar, 2021-2022, and a Fulbright Postdoctoral Researcher, 2019-2021.

Dr. Laughlin has three digital archaeology projects:

1. The Serapian and Isiac Trails
2. Roman Aqaba Project 2.0: A Legacy of Cultural Heritage
3. Sustaining the Cultural Heritage Legacy of Tell Nimrin

Amongst other scholarly publications, she is currently turning her dissertation, The Appropriation of the Hellenistic-Egyptian Cult of Serapis: A Multi-Disciplinary Study Focusing on Augustus, Nero, Hadrian, Their Coinage, and Villas. (embargoed), into a book.

Dr. Jessica MacLellan is an anthropological archaeologist (Ph.D. 2019, University of Arizona). She is interested in ritual, households, ceramics, and the development of complex societies in Mesoamerica. Most of her research has been conducted at the early Maya site of Ceibal, Guatemala, and she recently began the Suchilapan Archaeological Project in Veracruz, Mexico. Her work has been supported by internal and external grants and published in peer-reviewed journals. Dr. MacLellan teaches ANT112: Introduction to Archaeology and other courses in the Department of Anthropology. She is also affiliated with the Cultural Heritage and Preservation program. More information can be found on her personal website: jessicamaclellan.com

Dr. Dani Parker Moore, is an assistant professor of Multicultural Education and director of the Schools, Education, and Society Minor at Wake Forest University where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on multicultural education, community engagement and educational psychology. Her research interests include social foundations in education, qualitative research methods, social justice education, and parent/caregiver engagement in schools and community engagement.

Parker Moore’s current scholarship examines the experiences of essential worker parent/caregivers in facilitating online learning during the pandemic. Dr. Parker Moore addresses educational inequities and opportunities for social action through qualitative research and analysis. She is experienced in studies that focus on students, parents, caregivers, and community-based mentors with data collection involving semi-structured interviews, ethnographic observations, surveys, and focus groups. She most recently co-edited Mentoring Students of Color: Naming the Politics of Race, Social Class, Gender, and Power (2019).

Parker Moore serves as the Executive Director of the Wake Forest University Children’s Defense Fund Freedom School, a free six-week, literacy-based summer program for rising third through eighth-grade students, with the mission of empowering youth to excel and believe in their ability to make a difference in themselves, their families, communities, country, and the world with hope, education, and action. Parker Moore is the 2020 recipient of the Faculty Service Excellence Award from Wake Forest’s Office of Civic and Community Engagement.

Dr. Samanta Ordóñez investigates the construction of racialized gender categories and how they are being resisted and challenged by politically transformative cultural practices in diverse contemporary social settings. Her current teaching and research deal with Mexican and diasporic contexts where gender- and race-based hierarchies re-articulate the global logic of coloniality in neoliberal, populist, and other guises. She studies where translocal communities engage in complex forms of intercultural relationality to generate and share in alterable social identities, unrecognized forms of political and social activism, adaptive coalitions, and ways of living in resistance.

Her courses introduce intersectional and decolonial perspectives on cultural configurations of race and gender. This enhances students’ ability to recognize patterns of domination and practices of opposition unfolding within the structural dimensions of neoliberal globalization as lived and experienced from the heterogeneous positionalities constituting Mexican, Latin American, Latinx, Black, Asian, indigenous, and other overlapping social collectivities. She is the author of Mexico Unmanned: The Cultural Politics of Masculinity in Mexican Cinema (SUNY Press, 2021). This book is a study of current filmmaking that critically illustrates how Mexico’s deeply embedded mythologies of mestizo masculinity continue to manifest in categorically dehumanizing cultural representations of racialized men. Her scholarship appears in Chasqui and Studies in Hispanic and Latin American Cinemas. Dr. Ordóñez holds degrees from the Universidad Veracruzana (B.A.), the University of Western Ontario (M.A.), and Cornell University (M.A. & Ph.D.).

Ryan K. Schroth received his Ph.D. in French and Francophone literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He teaches courses in French language, culture, and literature at all levels of the program. His research interests include contemporary Francophone (North African) narratives, queer theory, and migrant writing. Currently, he is at work on his first manuscript, tentatively titled Queer Feelings: Affect, Migration, and the Body in Queer Francophone Literature. Dr. Schroth is a fervent supporter of study abroad, having lived in Burkina Faso, Canada, France, Morocco, and Spain. He earned his Master’s degree in French and a Bachelor’s in French Education from Bowling Green State University in Ohio.

Cassandra Tran completed her PhD in Classics from McMaster University in 2023. She was the 2021-2022 Crake Classics Fellow at Mount Allison University and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Wake Forest University the following year. She was awarded the Graduate Student Presentation Prize at the Classical Association of Canada’s 2022 Annual Meeting for her paper on olfactory costuming in Plautus’ Casina, and her research has been featured in the 2021 Emerging Scholars Series at NYU’s Center for Ancient Studies.

Cassandra’s scholarship focusses on Roman Comedy and gender and sexuality in the ancient Mediterranean world. Her research and teaching interests broadly include ancient drama, Augustan poetry, queer and gender theory, race and ethnicity, and Classical reception. In her dissertation, she identified a pattern of gender manipulation and investigated its destabilizing effects in character studies from plays by Plautus and Terence. Cassandra’s current project explores queer (that is, non-hetero-patriarchal) temporalities in Roman Comedy. In particular, she addresses questions about futurity in comic households, especially regarding expectations of marriage, reproduction, and inheritance.

Mir Yarfitz has lived in each of the four corners of the US as well as South and Central America. His enthusiasm for Latin America grew from his college study abroad experience in Nicaragua, a Fulbright in Argentina, and work with migrant farmworker labor unions in Washington, Oregon, and Georgia. His teaching and research interests include Latin American cultural production, social movements, dictatorships and resistance, racial hierarchies, migration, gender, sexuality,  masculinity, and transgender studies. His current research explores what might fruitfully be framed as trans lives in Argentina from 1900 to 1945, as part of the larger development of archivally-based trans studies. His 2019 Rutgers University Press book  Impure Migrations: Jews and Sex Work in Golden Age Argentina, historicizes immigrant Ashkenazi Jews in organized prostitution in Buenos Aires between the 1890s and 1930s and in broader transnational flows of sex workers and moral opposition. In addition to publishing in the fields of Latin American trans studies, sex work history, and Jewish studies, he has written collaboratively with a team of Wake Forest Librarians about their experiences in cooperative pedagogy and ungrading, including creating a zine together about the books (and zines) their students have written. He is a 2023 Kulynych Family Omicron Delta Kappa Award winner, selected by students for bridging “the gap between the classroom and student life.”