Core Faculty and Staff
Christin Essin(she/her/hers)
Chair – Gender and Sexuality Studies
Professor – Theatre, Gender and Sexuality Studies
christin.essin@vanderbilt.edu
Christin Essin is the Interim Chair for the Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies and a Professor of Theatre at Vanderbilt University. Her books include Working Backstage: A Cultural History and Ethnography (2021), winner of the John Frick Award in American Theatre and Drama and the Golden Pen Award from United States Institute of Theatre Technology, and Stage Designers in Early Twentieth Century America (2012). Her current research analyzes the uniforms of woman-identified athletes as costumes, performative garments that characterize athletes as active, autonomous subjects. She teaches numerous courses in GSS and Theatre, including Histories of Drag Performance, Performing Gender on the European Stage, Rituals and World Performance, and Storytelling. Read More
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Director of Undergraduate Studies – Gender and Sexuality Studies
Senior Lecturer – Gender and Sexuality Studies
kristin.e.rose@vanderbilt.edu
Ph.D. in English – Rutgers University
M.A. in English – Rutgers University
B.A. in English and Russian – Vanderbilt University
Kristin Rose’s dissertation, Women on the Wastes: Reimagining ‘Empty’ Environments in the Victorian Female Bildungsroman explores how some of the era’s most prolific women writers used the imaginatively charged landscape of the “waste” or “wasteland” to reimagine narratives of development beyond expropriative notions of British “progress.” Her teaching and research interests also include ecofeminism, environmental humanities, as well as narrative and novel theory. She earned her Ph.D. in English from Rutgers University. She has published in NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction and has work forthcoming in the Keats-Shelley Journal.
(she/they)
Professor – Gender and Sexuality Studies, History
katherine.b.crawford@vanderbilt.edu
Katherine Crawford is Director of the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies and Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. Her books include Perilous Performances: Gender and Regency in Early Modern France(Harvard University Press, 2004), European Sexualities, 1400-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and The Sexual Culture of the French Renaissance (Cambridge University Press, 2010). She is interested in the ways that gender informs sexual practice, ideology, and identity, both in normative and non-normative formations. She teaches a wide variety of classes in History and GSS on gender and sexuality. Read more.
(she/her/hers)
Principal Senior Lecturer – English, Gender and Sexuality Studies
elizabeth.covington@vanderbilt.edu
Elizabeth Covington is the Associate Chair and Senior Lecturer of the Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies as well as Senior Lecturer in the English Department. She earned her Ph.D. in English literature from Vanderbilt. Elizabeth has published articles in Genre and Journal of Modern Literature, and she is currently working on a book about experimental psychological theories of memory and the emergence of modernist literature in Britain. She teaches a wide variety of classes in GSS and English. Read more.
Julie Gamble(she/her/hers)
Assistant Professor – Gender and Sexuality Studies
julie.gamble.1@vanderbilt.edu
Julie Gamble is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies. She earned her Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from the University of California, Berkeley. Her current book project investigates urban mobility and the politics of care in Quito, Ecuador. She has also published single and co-authored articles related to gender and urban mobilities in journals like International Journal of Urban and Regional Research and Antipode. She is interested in the ways that gender informs urban experience and how to build fairer cities. She teaches courses on gender, the city, urban mobilities, Latinx urban environments and sustainable urban development.
Rebecca J. Epstein-Levi (she/her/hers)
Assistant Professor – Jewish Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies
rebecca.j.epstein-levi@vanderbilt.edu
Rebecca Epstein-Levi is a practical ethicist who works at the intersection of gender, sexuality, and the interpretation of classical Jewish texts. She is the author of When We Collide: Sex, Social Risk, and Jewish Ethics. Her current project examines neurodivergent affinities—and their ethical implications—in the Babylonian Talmud. She has also published on Jewish resources against vaccine refusal, balancing collective and individual interests between Jewish ethics and feminist ethics, and the ethics of expertise in sexual health, and has interests in feminist bioethics, environmental ethics, disability studies, and the ethics of textual interpretation. In her copious free time, she enjoys cooking unnecessarily complicated meals and sharpening her overly large collection of kitchen knives. Read more.
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Senior Lecturer – Gender and Sexuality Studies
danyelle.valentine@vanderbilt.edu
Danyelle Valentine is interested in the forced and voluntary migration for enslaved peoples from the United States to islands in the British West Indies from the late 18th through the early 19th centuries. Her dissertation, Embarking on Revolutionary Migrations: The Black Loyalists’ Southern Campaign for Freedom during the Revolutionary Era, 1775-1862, explores the relocation and settlement experiences of “Black Loyalists” in Jamaica and other islands throughout the British Caribbean. In addition to her dissertation research, Danyelle investigates the intersections between race, gender, and capitalism within Creole societies in the British Caribbean.
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Associate Professor – Gender and Sexuality Studies, Sociology
laura.carpenter@vanderbilt.edu
How does gender influence how sexuality and health unfold over the life course? My research examines how sexual and social experiences—such as sexual initiation, divorce, or the onset of chronic illness—affect a person’s sexual beliefs and behaviors later in life. I ask how individuals’ sexual biographies are shaped by broader cultural and historical changes, such as the sexual “revolution” of the late 1960s-early 1970s, and the invention of “revolutionary” pharmaceuticals. I focus on the ways in which intersections among gender, race, ethnicity, social class, and sexual orientation influence these life course processes, and the intertwined dynamics of gender, sexuality, and health from birth until death. Read more
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Associate Professor – Gender and Sexuality Studies, Philosophy, and Political Science
shatema.a.threadcraft@vanderbilt.edu
Shatema Threadcraft is the author of The Labors of Resurrection: Black Women, Necromancy and Morrisonian Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2025) and Intimate Justice: the Black Female Body and the Body Politic (Oxford University Press, 2016). The Labors of Resurrection examines the phenomenon of Black femicide as well as how Ida B. Wells, Mamie Till Bradley, Clementine Barfield, Barbara Smith, Margaret Prescod and Toni Morrison have confronted premature Black death and made transformative democratic interventions in response to those deaths. Intimate Justice won the National Women’s Studies Association’s 2017 Sara A. Whaley Award for the best book on women and labor, the 2017 W.E.B. Du Bois Distinguished Book Award from the National Conference of Black Political Scientists and the 2017 Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association’s Race, Ethnicity and Politics Organized Section (Best Book in Race and Political Theory). Her article, “Intimate Justice, Political Obligation and the Dark Ghetto” (Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 39, no. 3, 2014) was awarded the American Political Science Association’s 2015 Okin-Young Award, which recognizes the best paper on feminist political theory published in an English language academic journal in 2014. She was the 2017-2018 Ralph E. and Doris M. Hansmann Member at the Institute for Advanced Study and a Visiting Research Associate in the Department of Political Studies at University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg from 2009- 2012. Her research has been supported by Harvard’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, Princeton’s University Center for Human Values, the Ford Foundation, the American Association of University Women and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition. She co-convenes the Black Politics/Theory/History Workshop with Juliet Hooker, Minkah Makalani and Deva Woodly as well as the Women of Color Feminist Political Theory Summer School (formerly the Oxford-Vanderbilt Gender, Race and Political Theory Project) with Sophie Smith. Her work has appeared in the American Political Science Review, Political Theory, Contemporary Political Theory, The Du Bois Review, Signs, Politics & Gender, Race and Social Problems, Philosophical Topics, and Theoretical Criminology.
Recent Publications:
Anti-Black Violence and Toni Morrison’s Democratic Storytelling
Recent Events:
2024 Women of Color Feminist Political Theory Summer School
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Director – Project Safe
Senior Lecturer – Gender and Sexuality Studies
cara.tuttle@vanderbilt.edu
Cara Tuttle’s recent publications include “Preventing Sexual Harassment and Reducing Harm by Addressing Abuses of Power in Higher Education Institutions” and “Preventing and Addressing Retaliation Resulting from Sexual Harassment in Academia” for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Cara has served as Director of the Vanderbilt University Project Safe Center for Sexual Misconduct Prevention and Response since its founding in 2014. Cara provides institutional advocacy on aspects of University response systems and processes involving sexual violence and has represented the University on the AAU Advisory Board on Sexual Harassment and Gender Discrimination and the NASEM Action Collaborative to Prevent Sexual Harassment in Higher Education. Cara previously served as chair of the University’s Women’s Advancement and Equity (WAVE) Council. Cara serves on the advisory board of ATIXA, the nation’s leading membership organization for Title IX professionals, the Advisory Council of the NASEM Action Collaborative, and the advisory board of SSAIS, Stop Sexual Assault in Schools, which address sexual harassment in the K-12 setting.
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Senior Lecturer – Gender and Sexuality Studies
kristen.navarro@vanderbilt.edu
Kristen Navarro’s dissertation, entitled Adapted Bodies, Adapted Texts: Queer Survival via Early Modern Drama, explores the myriad ways in which the survival of queer bodies is abetted by filmic and theatrical adaptations of early modern dramatic literature. Her teaching and research interests also include popular culture, film and media studies, and writing/composition. She earned her PhD in English from Vanderbilt University.
Stacy Clifford Simplican(she/her/hers)
Principal Senior Lecturer – Gender and Sexuality Studies
stacy.c.simplican@vanderbilt.edu
Stacy Clifford Simplican’s book, The Capacity Contract: Intellectual Disability and the Question of Citizenship (2015), analyzes the role of intellectual and developmental disabilities in social contract theory and the disability rights movement. Some of Stacy’s articles appear in Contemporary Political Theory, Hypatia, Disability & Society, and Politics, Groups, and Identities. In her spare time, she enjoys teaching feminist theory to her three young children. She earned her PhD in Political Science from Vanderbilt University.
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E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Chair in Feminist Theology
Director of the Carpenter Program in Religion, Gender, and Sexuality
Professor – Gender and Sexuality Studies, Divinity
ellen.armour@vanderbilt.edu
Dr. Armour’s research interests are in feminist theology, theories of sexuality, race, gender, disability and embodiment, and contemporary continental philosophy. She is the author of Deconstruction, Feminist Theology, and The Problem Of Difference: Subverting the Race/Gender Divide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) and co-editor of Bodily Citations: Judith Butler and Religion (Columbia University Press, 2006), as well as a number of articles and book chapters. Her current book project, tentatively entitled Signs and Wonders: Theology After Modernity, will diagnose and craft a theological response to the shifts in our understanding of “man” and “his” others (sexed/raced, animal, and divine) as modernity declines. Read more.
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Professor – Political Science, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Law, and Climate and Environmental Studies
brooke.ackerly@vanderbilt.edu
Professor Ackerly is a Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University and co-Editor-in-Chief of the International Feminist Journal of Politics (2018-2021). In her research, teaching, and collaborations, she works to clarify without simplifying the most pressing problems of global justice, including human rights and climate change. Using feminist methodologies, she integrates into her theoretical work empirical research on activism and the experiences of those affected by injustice (Grounded Normative Theory). Read more.
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Professor – Economics
christopher.s.carpenter@vanderbilt.edu
Professor Carpenter is a health and labor economist who studies the effects of public policies on health and family outcomes. At Vanderbilt he is the Founder and Director of the TIPS-supported Vanderbilt LGBTQ+ Policy Lab, the Director of the Program in Public Policy Studies, and the faculty facilitator for Q&A (Queer & Asian). Carpenter is the Director of the NBER Health Economics Program, Editor at the Journal of Health Economics, a member of the National Advisory Council for the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, Vice President of the Southern Economic Association, a member of the Board of Directors of the American Society of Health Economists, and Co-Founder and Co-Chair of the American Economic Association’s Committee on the Status of LGBTQ+ Individuals in the Economics Profession (CSQIEP). For his contributions to EDI at Vanderbilt, Dr. Carpenter was named the 2021-22 Joseph A. Johnson, Jr., Distinguished Leadership Professor. He has published widely on the effects of legal same-sex marriage, the causes and consequences of youth substance use, and the effects of public policies on health behaviors such as bicycle helmet use, seatbelt use, smoking, cancer screening, and vaccination. Carpenter’s research has been continuously supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the American Cancer Society. He earned his BA from Albion College (MI), and his PhD at UC Berkeley. Read more.
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Professor – English, Gender and Sexuality Studies
kathryn.schwarz@vanderbilt.edu
Kathryn Schwarz received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1994. Her teaching and research interests include early modern literature and culture; feminist, queer, and gender studies; relationships between embodiment and social subjectivity; and theories of community. She is the author of What You Will: Gender, Contract, and Shakespearean Social Space (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), and Tough Love: Amazon Encounters in the English Renaissance (Duke University Press, 2000), which was awarded the Roland H. Bainton Book Prize for Literature in 2001. With Holly Crocker, she co-edited “Premodern Flesh,” a special issue of postmedieval (2013). Read more
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Director – Margaret Cuninggim Women’s Center
Principal Senior Lecturer in Gender and Sexuality Studies
rory.c.dicker@vanderbilt.edu
Rory Dicker is the director of the Margaret Cuninggim Women’s Center at Vanderbilt. She is the author of A History of U.S. Feminisms and coeditor of Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st Century. A native of New York State, Dicker completed her undergraduate studies in English and French at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in English from Vanderbilt. She enjoys teaching courses about the history of feminisms, women and literature, and banned books.
Collaborative Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow
Seyi Osundeko is a scholar of contemporary African and Black diasporic literature. Her research explores the intersections of decolonial feminism and affect theory.
Her current book project, Tears Still Fall: Feminine Self-Mourning in Theory and Practice, reevaluates mourning outside of a stoic or pathological framework to explore its generative possibilities. To this end, the project redefines the psychological term “self-mourning,” historically referring to grieving one’s imminent death, to instead mean grieving intangible losses of self, such as losses of futurity, potential, and self-determination. Seyi received her PhD in English from Stanford University in 2026.
Charlotte Pierce-Baker(she/her/hers)
Professor Emerita
c.pierce-baker@vanderbilt.edu
Charlotte Pierce-Baker received her B.A. in English from Howard University and the Master’s degree in Speech and Hearing Sciences from Ohio State University. She was awarded the Ph.D. in Speech Pathology and Applied Linguistics from Temple University. She served as Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Vanderbilt from 2009 to 2012 and has taught, researched, and written in the areas of American literature and women of color, applied linguistics and dialects, and more recently in the areas of trauma and gender violence. Pierce-Baker’s two books have disturbed discussion in their areas of inquiry: Surviving the Silence: Black Women‘s Stories of Rape (W.W. Norton, 2008, 2009) and This Fragile Life: A Mother’s Story of a Bipolar Son (Lawrence Hill Books, 2012).