Graduate Students & Fellows
- Joan Blakey
CGS Fellow
Joan Blakey is a doctoral candidate in the School of Social Service Administration. She has spent most of her career in the field of child welfare. She worked at the State of Minnesota, as a policy advocate and then at Hennepin County as a child protection worker. She returned to school because she was not satisfied with the myriad explanations for the disproportionate representation of poor African American families in the child protection system. Her dissertation research seeks to understand the confluence of factors that contribute to African American mothers who are addicted to drugs and alcohol retaining, regaining, or permanently losing custody of children who are involved with the child protection system.
She uses a multiple embedded case study approach. The project recruited mothers from an established substance-abuse treatment center that specializes in serving women and their children in Chicago, Illinois. Within the substance abuse treatment center, she recruited a purposive sample of 26 African American mothers who were participating in substance-abuse treatment and had current child protection involvement with at least one of their children. In addition, she recruited each mother’s child welfare caseworker, treatment counselor, and parenting worker. She used three methods of data collection: (a) observation of the treatment setting (14 months); (b) in-depth interviews with the mothers, substance-abuse treatment providers (counselors and parenting professionals), and child welfare caseworkers; and (c) file review.
She hopes that her dissertation will lead to practice and policy changes that will increase retention and reunification among African American mothers. Originally from Minnesota, she received her Bachelor of Science and MSW degrees from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. This year, she is excited about delving into her data and writing up her findings. In her spare time, she loves to read, write poetry, and go to the movies.
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- Joe Fischel
LGSP Hormel Fellow
Joe Fischel is a PhD candidate in the Political Science Department at the University of Chicago, and his research interests are in normative political theory, feminist and queer theory, and law. His dissertation focuses on contemporary cultural representations of and legal regulations around sexual harm, with particular attention to the ways such representations and regulations are mediated through the figures of the child and the sexual predator. In 2007-2008, he was the Lesbian and Gay Studies Project student coordinator at CGS, and in 2008-2009 he was a lecturer for CGS courses in the winter and spring quarters. When not by his laptop, he can be found on the north side of Chicago, running on the lake path, practicing yoga, and searching for good sushi deals. He is tremendously grateful for the Hormel Fellowship and looking forward to this year.
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- Elizabeth Hutcheon
CGS Fellow
Elizabeth Hutcheon is a PhD candidate in the English department. Her dissertation, "Imitating Women: Rhetoric, Gender, and Humanist Pedagogy in English Renaissance Drama," seeks to uncover the role of women's speeches in the teaching of rhetoric to schoolboys in the early modern period. She argues that, contrary to what we've been taught about the role of women's speech in the Renaissance, women's speeches in classical texts were presented to schoolboys as appropriate models of rhetoric. Boys were not invited to see women's speech as qualitatively different from their own; instead, speaking women in classical texts were divorced from the social anxieties that surrounded "real" women in the period. Using this as a framework of analysis, she then turn to Shakespeare's work in order to examine how he negotiates the relationship between gender, speech, and education in his plays.
Elizabeth has an MA in English from the University of Chicago, as well as Masters of Studies in both English and Women's Studies from Oxford University. She received her BA in English and Classics from Georgetown University.
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- Sarah Imhoff
Gender & Sexuality Studies Workshop Coordinator
Sarah Imhoff is a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago Divinity School, whose work broadly considers gender and Judaism. She received a BAS in religious studies and mathematics from Stanford University in 2002 and an MA from the University of Chicago Divinity School in 2005.
She is currently writing her dissertation on the role of gender, sexuality, and race in the construction of images of Jewish men and women in early twentieth-century America. In a time when American culture wrestled with both masculinity and femininity, these became powerful tools in drawing social boundaries and creating ideals. The dissertation will argue that many Americans thought that Jews enacted gender and sexuality strangely, and it was no accident that non-Jews used the language of gender, sexuality, and race to “other” Jews in the early twentieth century. In other projects, Sarah also looks at the images of women and gender in rabbinic literature.
- Alison Lefkovitz
CGS Fellow
Alison Lefkovitz is an advanced doctoral candidate in the History Department whose research focuses on 20th century United States gender, sexuality, and political history. Her dissertation explores the politics of marriage from 1963 until the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment. Her research shows how feminists, members of the New Left, welfare rights activists, and gay liberationists assaulted the cultural, legal, and economic practice of marriage, working to nullify a traditional regime rooted in sex difference. In crucial respects, they succeeded in dismantling institutional economic dependence, the legal residues of coverture, and the cultural compulsion to marry. Yet broad fears of marriage without gender eventually helped bring forth the political triumph of the Right. Eliminating distinctions between husbands and wives frightened many Americans who saw families under the new gender order as strikingly reminiscent of welfare families. Moreover gay marriage became a locus of anxiety as Americans grappled with the passing of an old gender order. The Right’s identification of family as the lynchpin of society eventually prompted a backlash that brought Americans concerned about gender, sexuality, race, class, welfare, and the growing federal state into one cohesive conservative movement.
Alison has a BA from Indiana University. She has been a part of the Center for Gender Studies for several years, serving as the Gender Studies preceptor and coordinating the History of Women at the University of Chicago project.
- Jay Sosa
CGS Fellow
Jay Sosa is a third year doctoral student in sociocultural anthropology. His ethnographic research centers around competing queer consumer and activist ideologies in São Paulo. His broader interests include the politics of gender and class differences in queer communities, commodities and erotics, mass media and urban space.
- Anthony Todd
BA Preceptor
Anthony Todd is a Ph.D. student in the History Department focusing on American History, Law and Gender. His dissertation will focus on the origins of the Progressive Movement in Chicago. Originally from Iowa City, Anthony is a graduate of Macalester College. Anthony has co-taught "Problems in Sexuality" and led his own course on the history of masculinity.
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- Alicia VandeVusse
LGSP Hormel Fellow
Alicia VandeVusse is a PhD student in the Sociology Department. Her research focuses on processes of medicalization, notions of family, and issues of reproduction. Originally from Milwaukee, Alicia received a B.A. in Economics from Smith College in 2004 and an M.A. in Sociology from the University of Chicago in 2007. Her dissertation explores the formation of "nontraditional" families using assisted reproductive technologies (ART), with a focus on how legal and professional regulation (or lack thereof) affects the experiences of patients and providers. She investigates how both the regulatory context and doctors' personal conceptualizations of family influence the provision of care to nontraditional ART patients. Her other research interests include the changing experience of birth in America and popular culture depictions of reproduction and nontraditional families.