2024-25 Faculty Research Grants

The 2024-25 Faculty Research Grants program is a grant from the University at Buffalo Gender Institute that funds high-quality, innovative scholarship related to women, gender, and sexuality. Supported activities include data collection, archival research, fieldwork, research assistance, travel, supplies, software, and curriculum development; course releases may also be funded with department chair approval.

The institute especially encourages collaborative and interdisciplinary projects likely to lead to external funding applications. Eligible applicants are full-time tenure-track faculty, teaching faculty, or research scientists at the University at Buffalo. Grants range from $1,000 to $7,000.

No 2026 deadline has been announced; applicants should check the Gender Institute website.

Faculty Research Grants - Gender Institute - University at Buffalo The Gender Institute offers grants to UB faculty to support research and/or curriculum development that exemplifies high quality, innovative scholarship related to women, gender, and sexuality. The Institute is particularly interested in supporting projects that are collaborative and/or interdisciplinary and those that will lead to applications for an external award.

Grants range from $1,000 - $7,000 and can be used for data collection, archival research, fieldwork, research assistance, supplies, books, software, travel integral to the development of the project, and other forms of research support and curriculum development expenses that are allowable under UB guidelines. Funds can also be used for course releases with the support of the applicant’s department chair.

Applicants must be full-time tenure-track faculty, teaching faculty, or research scientists at the University at Buffalo. Past recipients may reapply three years after a successful Gender Institute application. Check back for the 2026 application due date.

Applications should be sent to ub-irewg@buffalo. edu and must include (in one PDF): 1. Application cover sheet, available here .

2. Cover letter with project title, one-paragraph (200-word maximum) abstract, and the name(s), position(s), and department(s) of the applicant(s). 3.

Three- to five-page, double-spaced research proposal, including: projected outcomes, timeline for project completion, and specific budget with details of planned expenditures. Proposal should be written to be understood by someone who is not in the field. 4.

One page outlining how the application aligns with the mission of the Gender Institute and the extent of the applicant’s prior involvement with the Gender Institute. 5. Current CV (short version of no more than three pages).

6. List of previous and upcoming research support (grants, fellowships, leaves) and outcomes. 7.

List of external funding sources (secured or targeted), if applicable. 8. If you intend to use the funds for a course release please provide a letter of support from your departmental chair.

Research grant applications will be evaluated by the Gender Institute’s Fellowship Awards Committee, which represents a cross-section of the university, and will be awarded based on the following criteria: The quality and potential of the proposed research project and its relevance to women, gender and sexuality. Planned application for external funding or award. Collaborative and interdisciplinary nature of the project.

The completion record of previous research projects, if applicable. The proposal’s ability to communicate the importance of the project beyond the applicant’s home discipline. The applicant’s demonstrated commitment to participation in Institute programs.

Research Report : Within one year of receiving a research grant, recipients must submit a one-page summary of their research or research update, along with a description of how the award helped the recipient(s) pursue their research goals. Recipients will also present their research as part of a Feminist Research Alliance presentation or other GI event. Daniel B.

Hess, Professor, School of Architecture and Planning Queer and LGBTQ-Friendly Cities: Place and Identity in Queer Enclaves This project explores the histories and trajectories of America’s gay cities and towns and their queer spaces—both within the United States and internationally.

Sexual orientation and gender identity is a critical part of shaping the life and vitality of cities, and this collected work will analyze the spatial dimensions of LGBTQ+ identity. Through an exploration of LGBTQ+ spaces, cultural scenes, and movements, this effort traces how cities and regions with large LGBTQ+ populations and inclusive attitudes toward sexual minorities have navigated both challenges and opportunities.

This project will explore the unique processes through which these cities evolved, current challenges they face, trajectories of change, and future prospects. Established queer and gay cities will be explored—including Palm Springs, Calif. ; Key West, Florida; Provincetown, Mass.

—and new gay enclaves— including Asbury Park, New Jersey; Asheville, North Carolina; Eureka Springs, Arkansas; Hudson, New York; Marfa, Texas—will be identified,. Queer people and queer urban spaces are at the forefront of this scholarly inquiry, and the project will trace broader experiences for the LGBTQ+ community in gay cities, including the political aspects of urban growth and change.

A fully-developed plan and proposal for a collected work about this subject is the planned outcome of this Gender Institute faculty grant. Daniel Baldwin Hess is Professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning in the School of Architecture and Planning at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. He earned a doctoral degree in urban planning from the University of California, Los Angeles.

He was previously Visiting Scholar and Director of the Centre for Migration and Urban Studies at the University of Tartu, Estonia, where he was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie International Fellow funded by the European Commission.

His research addresses interactions between housing, transportation, land use, and other public concerns, and he develops new pathways for understanding spatial inequalities and the complex socio-economic landscape of cities. Creating cities and communities that are more equitable and inclusive is central to his scholarship.

He is a two-time Fulbright Scholar awardee [Tallinn University of Technology (Estonia) and Kraków University of Technology (Poland)] a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at Columbia University, recipient of a Baltic-America Freedom Foundation scholarship, and winner of an Eisenhower Fellowship from the U.S. Department of Transportation.

He is editor-in-chief of the journal Town Planning Review (Liverpool University Press) and co-editor of four books including The Life and Afterlife of Gay Neighborhoods: Renaissance and Resurgence (SpringerNature 2021). Cole Lowman, Assistant Professor of Teaching, Engineering Education Gendered Labor and Racialized Capital in Contemporary Rap Music Building from W. E.

B. Du Bois’ argument at the turn of the twentieth century that the problem was the color line, this project argues that the problem in the twenty-first century is colorblindness, or the false claim that a person (or the law) does not see color.

By claiming not to see Blackness, colorblindness deidentifies race and figuratively consumes it, while lived experience in a raced body demonstrates the reality of race consciousness in America. This creates a form of what DuBois calls, “double consciousness,” or seeing oneself from the inside and the outside, simultaneously.

Analyzing the lyrical content and visual performances of music by Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion, Lil Nas X, Tyler the Creator, and Kendrick Lamar reveals that capitalism consumes Blackness in gendered ways. By simultaneously reproducing, repurposing, and resisting racialized markets, these rappers historicize patterns of gendered labor.

I position these patterns as technologies of racial capitalism that operate despite claims of colorblindness and highlight the ways that these artists use technical communication to provide strategies for survival as a Black person in the United States.

This project trace how feminine, masculine, queer, and nonconforming embodiments of Blackness are differently commodified and therefore consumed under late‑stage capitalism in contemporary America. Cole Lowman is an Assistant Professor of Teaching in the Department of Engineering Education at the University at Buffalo.

Their teaching, research, and community engagement focus on questions of racial and gender equity in the context of both American cultural production and technical and professional communication. Their work appears in Pedagogy , Howard Journal Communications , and Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric , among other venues.

Elisabeth Paquette, Associate Professor, Comparative Literature and Global Gender and Sexuality Studies Unparalleled Catastrophe: Toward Ceremonies of Liberation The focus of my book, tentatively titled Unparalleled Catastrophe: Toward Ceremonies of Liberation , is decolonial theorist Sylvia Wynter’s account of the climate crisis.

In this monograph, I argue that Wynter offers us presently unacknowledged paths forward regarding the current climate crisis. While Wynter herself names this climate crisis only briefly in one essay, the goal of my book is to weave a climate analysis back through her corpus, attending to environmental justice, solidarity, and liberation.

My reading of Wynter addresses the political dimensions of the climate catastrophe that remain under-theorized and unaddressed, and through which we can reconceive of our relations to ourselves, each other, and the worlds around us. By highlighting these political dimensions, it becomes possible to develop ethical and political responses to the climate crisis.

My discussion of the climate catastrophe reread back into Wynter’s corpus is important because it reanimates Wynter’s project in a manner that is often left untouched. Doing so also allows for what I believe are extensions into various fields that Wynter herself has not developed. For instance, I develop how Wynter’s project is inclusive to gender non-conforming and trans individuals.

Similarly, I engage in an extensive analysis of how Indigeneity appears within her project. Finally, there is an ever increasing need to take steps to address the climate catastrophe, and through my analysis of Wynter’s work I offer such steps. Elisabeth Paquette is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Global Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Buffalo, SUNY.

She works at the intersection of social and political philosophy, feminist philosophy, queer theory, and decolonial theory. Her book, Universal Emancipation: Race beyond Badiou (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), engages French political theorist Alain Badiou’s discussion of Négritude and the Haitian Revolution to develop a nuanced critique of his theory of emancipation.

She is also the Assistant Director of philoSOPHIA: A Society for Transcontinental Feminism, co-director of The Kristeva Circle, Series Editor of the American Philosophical Associations Women in Philosophy Blog, and co-editor of the journal Feminist Philosophy Quarterly. Peter Q.

Pfordresher, Professor, Psychology Psychophysiological bases for singing voice gender dysphoria among transgender singers It is typically assumed that auditory feedback from one’s own voice is strongly associated with self-identity.

In this project (a collaboration with graduate student Logan Barrett), we test the hypothesis that this assumption fails to generalize to the experience of transgender individuals who report experiencing vocal gender incongruence.

We further hypothesize that this incongruence may be enhanced for singing over speaking, given the biomechanical and expressive demands unique to singing, including the role of gender stereotypes during sung performance (e.g., roles in opera).

We will run a study that addresses the psychophysiological basis of singing gender dysphoria, by comparing self-reports of stress with hormonal stress responses while singing with gender confirming or gender disconfirming auditory feedback, using analyses of saliva samples (focusing on cortisol levels) before and after the feedback manipulation.

We hypothesize that gender disconfirming feedback will cause stress for all participants, but to a significantly greater extent for transgender than for cisgender participants. Moreover, for transgender individuals, stress-alleviating, gender-confirming feedback is predicated to constitute alterations of self-produced feedback. Peter Q.

Pfordresher is a Professor of Psychology at UB. His research focuses on the relationship between perception and action in the context of music, including the sensorimotor bases of poor-pitch singing, the role of auditory feedback in music performance, cognitive mechanisms for retrieval of music during performance, and the interplay between melody and rhythm during perception and production.

His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Grammy Museum Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, and the National Association for Research in Music Education. His books include Psychology of Music: From Sound to Significance (3nd edition, with Siu-Lan Tan and Rom Harré, Routledge, 2025) and Sound and Action in Music Performance (Academic Press, 2019).

He has published over 75 peer reviewed journal articles . He is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and was President of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition in 2023 and 2024.

Christine Varnado, Associate Professor, Global Gender and Sexuality Studies and English Queering Birth, Queering Death: The Problem of Life in Early Modern Literature Varnado's second monograph (working title: Queering Birth, Queering Death: The Problem of Life in Early Modern Literature ) is about Macbeth; abortion and the criminalization of pregnancy outcomes in the 17 th century and today; what counts as a child; how something recognizable as "life" enters (and leaves) the world in early modern plays, childbirth manuals, and infanticide pamphlets; and the history of debates over what a literary character is.

The book plumbs the queer, unnatural, and uncanny dimensions of reproduction and death in early modern literature and media artifacts, using the curious phenomenon of characterization to confront, in our own time, the questions of "who counts as human?" and "whose life matters?" Christine Varnado is Associate Professor of Global Gender & Sexuality Studies and English.

Her first book, The Shapes of Fancy: Reading for Queer Desire in Early Modern Literature , was published by Minnesota in 2020. She has written essays on the prefix "post-," whiteness in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice , how the weather is queer in Macbeth , invisible sex in early modern drama, and the kinky turn in Renaissance studies.

Genie Yoo, Assistant Professor, History Botany on the Tongue: Plants, Empire, and Knowledge-Making in Indonesia (17th-20th c.) Genie’s current book project, Botany on the Tongue: Plants, Empire, and Knowledge-Making in Indonesia (17 th -20 th c.) , situates one of the most important spice islands in Indonesia—Ambon—at the center of information exchange.

With a focus on plants as materia medica , the book shows how European, Asian, and Indigenous historical actors of vastly different backgrounds collected, mediated, and circulated knowledge about nature, medicine, and religious practice.

Tracing layers of textual and oral transmission, translation, and circulation of information about plants, it emphasizes the co-existence of multiple regimes of value about nature and its relationship to the human body in both imperial and Islamic contexts.

A crucial aspect of this work highlights the role of the island’s Muslim practitioners and their manuscript translation and transmission of medical recipes, erotica, and esoteric understandings of sex. Genie Yoo is an assistant professor of history, working at the intersection of history of science, medicine, and Islam in island Southeast Asia.

Antoine Yoshinaka, Associate Professor, Political Science Gendered Dimensions of Political Polarization in Intimate Partnerships This project explores how political polarization affects relationship quality, centering gendered dynamics.

Drawing on theories of Political Assortative Mating, Social Exchange, Communication Accommodation, and the Stress Spillover Model, this research centers gender to ask: How do politically polarized couples manage their differences? How do gender roles shape responses to political disagreement? Do women and men experience different costs from political discord?

How do same-sex versus heterosexual couples navigate political polarization differently? Joint and individual interviews will identify gendered mechanisms through which political differences impact relationships. Findings will inform development of the "Political Polarization in Intimate Partnerships" (PPIP) scale and establish the foundation to examine these dynamics longitudinally.

This research will help our understanding of how gender intersects with political polarization in intimate life. Dr. Antoine Yoshinaka is an Associate Professor of political science at UB, where he conducts research on institutions and elections in the U.S. and around the world.

He has authored three books, including American Gridlock: The Sources, Character, and Impact of Political Polarization (Cambridge University Press, 2015), a co-edited volume on political polarization in U.S. politics.

He is also the author of Crossing the Aisle: Party Switching by U.S. Legislators in the Postwar Era (Cambridge University Press, 2016), the first-ever systematic study of the causes and conseuqences of party switching among members of Congress and U.S. state legislatures.

His work has also been published in leading political science journals such as the Journal of Politics, the British Journal of Political Science , Legislative Studies Quarterly , and Political Research Quarterly .

Alexandra Zirkle, Assistant Professor, Jewish Thought Ecocritical Modern Jewish Thought: Sacrifice, Decay, Trees, and Time With the support of the Gender Institute, Professor Zirkle will continue work on her second book manuscript, which explores how modern Jewish thought might theorize a planetary politics.

The field of Jewish environmental ethics interprets biblical, rabbinic, and other Jewish sources to develop stewardship-oriented ethical practices—however, this scholarship remains limited by its largely anthropocentric scope. A second scholarly tradition draws on Jewish mystical sources to craft a Jewish theology of an immanent Divine manifested in the natural world—but these accounts mute the immediacy of anthropogenic climate change.

With appreciation for the contributions of these two bodies of scholarship, this book asks what ecocritical theories might emerge from the 19th-21st-century philosophical and literary sources comprising modern Jewish thought.

Ecocritical Modern Jewish Thought: Sacrifice, Decay, Trees, and Time proffers the first full-length ecocritical account of modern Jewish thought by reinterpreting sacrifice, decomposition, trees, and time in the works of Ludwig Philippson, Hermann Cohen, Margarete Susman, and Susan Taubes.

This book crafts a more-than-human reinterpretation of sacrifice; brings to the fore decomposition as the prelude to resurrection; maps the critique of nationalism posed by tree-thinking; and theorizes a nonbinary Jewish ecocritical time. Alexandra Zirkle is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Jewish Thought.

Professor Zirkle's research centers biblical interpretation as a mode of critical inquiry, foregrounds how the interpretation of scripture functions as political speech, and restores nineteenth-century figures to an archive of modern Jewish thought.

Her forthcoming book, Contested Scripture: The Bible, Politics, and Modern Jewish Thought details how nineteeth-century German Jewish scholars harnessed the technical language of biblical scholarship to parlay scriptural interpretation into political possibility.

Through their Bible commentaries, Ludwig Philippson, Salomon Herxheimer, and Heinrich Graetz reconceptualized race, religion, history, and scripture to imagine liberatory Jewish futures.

Professor Zirkle's scholarship has appeared in journals including The Jewish Quarterly Review and Modern Judaism and has been supported by institutions including the Center for Jewish History, the Association for Jewish Studies, and UB's Humanities Institute.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Desires: Judaism, Jewishness, and the Secular Epistemology of the Closet This project revisits Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s 1989 classic Epistemology of the Closet , a foundational text of queer theory, in order to locate Judaism and Jewishness in the intellectual genealogy of gender and sexuality studies.

While much of queer theory presents itself as decidedly secular, Epistemology of the Closet is concerned throughout with ambivalence concerning this apparent secularity, an ambivalence that gathers and knots its considerable ideological energies around the ambiguously religio-racial figure of the Jew.

Attending to this figure’s spectral presence in Sedgwick’s field-defining thinking affords a challenging new understanding of the origins and conceptual underpinnings of what turns out to be a not-so-familiar canonical work of queer theory.

A Faculty Research Grant from the Gender Institute will support research in Sedgwick’s personal archives housed at Duke University’s Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library in Spring/Summer 2025. Dr. Samuel P. Catlin is the Irving M.

and Marilyn C. Shuman Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Jewish Thought at UB.

A scholar of American Jewish literature, he is currently completing two monographs: Judaism in Theory , which situates an often-elided preoccupation with Judaism at the center of the post-1960s American mode of intellectual inquiry called “theory”; and The Rest is Literature: Secularism and the Institution of Literary Studies , which tracks the institutional, discursive, and disciplinary imbrications of literary research and pedagogy with a secularist ideal of American political identity in the twentieth century.

His latest article, “Auerbach’s Abraham(s): Biblical Narrative and the Genesis of Critical Reading,” is forthcoming from Prooftexts . He also writes regularly for a broader public in publications such as Parapraxis , Political Theology Network , Post45: Contemporaries , and The New Republic , among others.

Dr. Kim Chaney is an Assistant Professor in the University at Buffalo’s Department of Psychology whose research focuses on how everyday people theorize about and understand how prejudice operates in themselves, others, and society broadly, with implications for how people confront prejudice, express allyship, and experience discrimination.

By examining basic and applied questions about how people perceive, experience, and combat prejudice in their day to day lives, her research aims to broaden our understanding of prejudice and stigma, especially as it relates to cognitive, health, and behavioral outcomes. Dr. Chaney has published over 30 peer-reviewed articles and was named a 2024 Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science APS).

Dr. Megan Holland Iantosca is an Associate Professor at the University at Buffalo in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy. She is a sociologist of education and her research focuses on understanding the causes and consequences of racial, gender and class inequality during educational transitions and racial/ethnic and gender categorization processes within institutions.

She is the author of Divergent Paths to College: Race, Class and Inequality in High Schools (Rutgers University Press) and has published in a number of scholarly journals including The Journal of Higher Education, Teacher’s College Record, Sociology of Education, and Sociological Forum . Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Spencer Foundation and the American Sociological Association.

Fanachu Famalao’an: The Gendered Chamoru Politics of Decolonization in Guåhan Chamorus, the Indigenous peoples of the Mariånas archipelago in the Western Pacific Ocean, are a matrilineal, clan-based society. Before colonization, maga’håga’ (highest-ranking daughters) led the clans, inherited and stewarded our clans’ resources, and were the final decision-makers in village council meetings.

Today, Chamoru women continue to steward our Indigenous nation, as reflected in their disproportionate participation and leadership in Chamoru movements for Indigenous sovereignty.

Drawing from survey data (n=968) from an original participatory action research project in my homeland of Guåhan (the archipelago’s southernmost island), I empirically investigate the utility of Indigenous feminist theories in explaining gendered differentials in Chamoru political attitudes towards multiple dimensions of the colonial U.S.-Guåhan relationship—including welfare rights ineligibility, political disenfranchisement, militarization of our sacred tåno’ (land) and tåsi (water).

Ultimately, this project highlights the value of cross-pollination between Indigenous feminist theories and quantitative political science research, while illuminating the complex role that Chamoru women continue to play in Guåhan’s ongoing struggle against the U.S.’ violent and perverse colonial chokehold. Kevin Lujan Lee (Chamoru) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Indigenous Studies.

As a political sociologist, he engages with theories and methodologies from sociology, Indigenous Studies, and political science to improve how we understand Indigenous mobilizations against contemporary formations of empire and settler-colonialism.

His current research focuses on (1) the Indigenous politics of decolonization in Oceania; (2) Pacific Islander social movements in the continental United States; and (3) Indigenous Oceanic political thought, in collaboration with Josh Campbell (UCLA).

His interdisciplinary research has been published in the fields of political science ( Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics ), Indigenous and Pacific Studies ( Wíčazo Ša Review , The Contemporary Pacific ), and urban planning ( Environment and Planning F , Planning Theory & Practice ).

He was previously a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow in Political Science at the University of British Columbia and holds a PhD in Urban Planning and Politics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Kelsey Lewis is an Assistant Professor in Global Gender and Sexuality Studies. Lewis' overarching professional goal is to participate in undoing the paradigm of binary sex in biology and medicine.

Lewis engages in collaborative projects ranging from sex-diverse gender-inclusive biology education to sex-inclusive approaches to healthcare. Lewis came to UB in 2022 from the Witting Postdoctoral Fellowship in Feminist Biology at University of Wisconsin-Madison. She was previously an AAUW American Dissertation Fellow and an NSF Graduate Research Fellow.

Collective Choreographies of Solidarity: Two Spirit Powwow and Queer Second Line In this project, Nereson argues that Two Spirit powwow and second line dance practices function as collective choreographies for queer affirmation and solidarity that intervene in heteropatriarchal structures of dance, society, and education as they have developed in the US from the nineteenth century to the present.

This project is related to their next book, Reparative Encounters: Universities, the Arts, and the Afterlives of Dispossession , which traces the survivance of Black and Indigenous aesthetic production through an analysis of how and why universities in the US fund the arts in response to their historical entwinement with racialized labor and land dispossession, specifically the transatlantic slave trade and Indigenous genocide.

One of the book’s chapters focuses on extracurricular dance practices by students that refuse the racialized enclosure of the university as they simultaneously affirm queer identity and relation, specifically the choreographies of powwow and second line.

These forms historically developed as heteronormative competition structures, and they hope to document and analyze spaces where heteropatriarchy is undermined and relations enacted otherwise in second line as well as Two Spirit powwow. Ariel Nereson is Associate Professor of Dance Studies and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University at Buffalo – SUNY.

She is the author of the award-winning book Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past, as well as several essays about movement-based performance, race, and embodiment in the United States. Her research has most recently been recognized with the Robert Schanke Research Award (Mid-America Theatre Conference), and the Sally Banes Prize (American Society for Theatre Research).

Ariel is coeditor of Theatre Journal , and a practicing choreographer and dramaturg. Bauhaus Under Nazism: Creativity, Collaboration, and Resistance in Hitler’s Germany, 1933-1945 This faculty award from the Gender Institute will enable me to travel to Europe to research for my book project, Bauhaus Under Nazism: Creativity, Collaboration, and Resistance in Hitler’s Germany, 1933-1945.

The book tells the story of how members of the Bauhaus art and design movement came to grips with life under the Nazi dictatorship. As arguably the most influential twentieth-century art, architecture, and design school, the Bauhaus transformed teaching and practice across disciplines and media.

Unlike most scholars who focus on iconic Bauhaus figures in exile after the school’s 1933 closure, I consider the majority of the movement’s 1,400 members—over eighty percent—who remained in Nazi-occupied Europe. This approach recasts the movement’s history after 1933 into one of surprising compatibility with Nazism. Many adapted to the regime or even embraced it.

Some worked as artists or in design and media; others designed concentration camps and armaments plants. Understanding how Bauhaus art and design served the Nazi regime challenges common assumptions of Nazi aesthetics as uniquely retrograde and modern art movements as intrinsically virtuous. And it reveals the complexities negotiated by those marginalized in Nazi society, including communist, Jewish, queer, and female Bauhäusler .

Elizabeth Otto is Director of the Humanities Institute and Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at UB. She is the author of scholarly articles and books including Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities, and Radical Politics (2019), Tempo, Tempo! The Bauhaus Photomontages of Marianne Brandt (2005), and, together with Patrick Rössler, Bauhaus Women: A Global Perspective .

In 2024, she co-curated the exhibition “Bauhaus and National Socialism,” which was shown in three locations in the German city of Weimar and viewed by over 83,000 people. Dr. Parks is a Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Psychology. Her research focuses on young adult substance use and associated-negative consequences.

Her most recent work focuses on development of preventive interventions aimed at reducing sexual assault of college women by increasing risk awareness and reducing heavy substance use.

Anonymity in the Global Age: Folded Feminisms in the Cinema of Ana Nyma (Iran) and Abounaddara (Syria) My book manuscript, Anonymous Cinema in the Global Age , is the first comprehensive attempt to theorize anonymous modes of expression in global cinema from a historical, social, and political perspective.

The book examines anonymous forms of cinema that have recently arisen as a means of protest against repressive regimes across the globe in countries such as Iran, Egypt, and Syria.

The book’s first chapter highlights the phenomenon of contemporary anonymous women directors, focusing on the filmmaker who identifies herself as either Ana Nyma or Anonymous (Iran) and the anonymous collective Abounaddara (Syria), the majority of whom are women.

Anonymous authorship may invite inquiry or arouse curiosity but given the inflammatory subject of the political situation in these countries, it becomes necessary for mere survival. In this chapter I argue that Ana Nyma and Abounaddara adopt their rebellious and defiant tactics in response to state-sanctioned erasure and obscurity, expressing their feminisms in a folded way.

Both the book project and its first chapter reflect my effort not only to give more prominence and resonance to women’s voices but also to highlight the role of non-Western women directors and their unique modes of expression in world cinema. By offering a detailed examination of global cinematic anonymity, I seek to make an original and significant contribution to film and media studies, feminist theory, and postcolonial theory.

Tanya Shilina-Conte is Assistant Professor of Global Film Studies in the Department of English, University at Buffalo. She is the founder of the Center for Global Media, director of the Global Film minor, and curator of the Global Film Series. Her book, Black Screens, White Frames: Gilles Deleuze and the Filmmaking Machine, was published by Oxford University Press in 2024.

She is currently at work on a new book, Anonymous Cinema in the Global Age , which will feature a chapter on Iranian and Syrian anonymous women filmmakers. Her articles and book chapters have appeared in Screen , Film-Philosophy , Frames Cinema Journal , Word & Image , Studia Phænomenologica , Iran Namag , Leitura: Teoria & Prática , Studia Linguistica , Border Visions: Identity and Diaspora in Film , and elsewhere.

Her work has been supported by the UB Faculty Grant for Global and International Research; UB Humanities Institute Faculty Research Fellowship; UB Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy Research Grant; Dr. Nuala McGann Drescher Program Award, SUNY; Centro Congressi Stefano Franscini Grant, Switzerland; Lisbon Consortium Grant, Catholic University of Portugal; Princeton-Weimar Grant, International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy, Bauhaus-Universität, Germany; Philipps University Grant, Germany; the Canadian-American Studies Grant; George Soros Open World Society Grant; American Councils for International Education Grant; and National Council for Economic Education Grant, among others.

Dying to Bring Life: A Social History of Maternal Deaths in Nigeria The clinical causes of maternal deaths in Nigeria are well established; however, the long history of socio-cultural “cause and effect” that shape these deaths are not.

In this second book project, Dying to Bring Life: A Social History of Maternal Deaths in Nigeria , I approach maternal deaths as incidents that are mired in a long history of cultural practices and political structures. I analyze the evolving ways in which communities have understood or grappled with maternal deaths in environments of economic handicaps, inadequate medical infrastructure, and resource scarcity.

How, for instance, have cultural practices surrounding maternal deaths “normalized” these deaths or rendered