Graduate Student Updates
June 23, 2018
Savina Balasubramanian (PhD Candidate, Sociology)
Savina Balasubramanian’s article, “Motivating Men: Social Science and the Regulation of Men’s Reproduction in Postwar India,” was recently published in Gender & Society. Savina will start a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Loyola University Chicago in Fall 2018.
Karlia Brown (PhD Candidate, Sociology)
Karlia Brown received an Alumni Funds Grant from the Sociology Department, as well as a Summer Research Grant from SPAN. Additionally, she presented her paper “How Women Studying Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Perceive Traditionally ‘Feminine’ Fields and the Women Who Pursue Them” at the American Sociological Association Annual Conference in Philadelphia, PA in August 2018.
Ivan Bujan (PhD Candidate, Performance Studies)
Ivan was a TA for GSS for the 2017-2018 school year. He published a chapter in Viral Dramaturgies: HIV and AIDS in Performance in the Twenty-First Century entitled “Blue Is, Blue Does: A Performance about Truvada in Several Interactions.” He presented a paper at the American Studies Association (ASA) in Chicago entitled “PrEP4Love: World-making Performances as Pedagogies of Dissent.” Additionally, Ivan organized a workshop co-sponsored by GSS and SPAN: “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?” He also received a Summer Research Grant from SPAN and a Graduate Research Grant from TGS.
Cara Nash Dickason (PhD Candidate, Screen Cultures)
Cara’s chapters “Girls Worth Looking At: Surveillance, Race, and Class in Contemporary Teen Girl TV” and “‘Someone Was Watching Us’: Surveillance and Spectatorship in Pretty Little Liars” were published in the collections Mediated Girlhoods, Vol. 2, and ABC Family to Freeform, respectively. With support from SPAN she 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.
Alyssa Lynne (PhD Candidate, Sociology)
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 was also 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.
Mollie McQuillan (PhD Candidate, Human Development and Social Policy)
Mollie McQuillan developed and instructed the SESP undergraduate course, “Gender Identity Development, Minority Stress, and Policies: An Interdisciplinary Perspective.” She received support from the 2017 National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship, 2017-2019 Northwestern University Presidential Fellowship, and the Summer 2017 Sexualities Project at Northwestern University (SPAN) Dissertation Fellowship. She published a chapter entitled “Educational Attainment and Sexual Orientation in Adolescent and Young Adult Males” in Sociological Studies of Children and Youth. Mollie also received conference and research support from the Graduate School Conference Grant; School of Education and Social Policy Conference Travel Grant; Sexualities Project at Northwestern Conference Presentation Travel Grant; National LGBTQ Conference Scholarship.
Lital Pascar (PhD Candidate, Communication Studies)
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 (PhD Candidate, Screen Cultures)
Whitney Pow’s research on queer and transgender histories of software and computing was generously supported by Northwestern’s two-year Presidential Fellowship. Whitney also 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.
Danielle Ross (PhD Candidate, Performance Studies)
Danielle Ross received funding from the Buffett Institute and the Department of Performance Studies. She presented her research at Dance Studies Association’s annual conference in Malta. Ross’ research took the form of performance and occurred at the In Motion graduate student conference at Northwestern, and in Portland, Oregon in collaboration with choreographer Linda Austin and visual artist Amy Conway.
Stefan Volger (PhD, Sociology)
Stefan published his article “Constituting the Sexually Violent Predator: Law, Forensic Psychology, and the Adjudication of Risk” in Theoretical Criminology and has several other manuscripts under review. He also presented work at several conferences, including those of the American Sociological Association, Law & Society Association, and Society for the Social Studies of Science. Additionally, Stefan recently received the Karpf Peace Prize from the NU Sociology Department for his research on LGBTQ asylum law. In July, Stefan began his position as Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Irvine.