Research Overview
Dive Deep. Faculty in the Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies engage in a wide range of research projects that examine the formation of gender and its intersections with other relations of power. GSS faculty research projects span the humanities and the social sciences, providing opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students from across disciplines to participate in groundbreaking research.
Research Stories
Shatema threadcraft
Oxford University Press publishes new book by Associate Professor Shatema Threadcraft, The Labors of Resurrection.
“Shat
ema Threadcraft’s The Labors of Resurrection examines Black grief and Black death as among the most important forces in contemporary American politics. Spectacular death—experienced publicly and violently—has given rise to global political movements, but it has also had an important gendered effect that has complicated Black women’s relationship to the âBlack people. Profiling Ida B. Wells, MamieTill-Bradley, Clementine Barfield, Barbara Smith, and Margaret Prescod, Threadcraft highlights how the centrality of spectacular death has functioned to marginalize Black women in the stories of Black peoplehood and has ensured that they are not the main beneficiaries of large-scale Black political mobilization. Black women receive ample, if largely symbolic, recognition for keeping Black communities alive, but they have not received the recognition they are due for their role in memorializing the Black dead. Threadcraft builds on her award-winning scholarship about Black womenâs access to intimate life and democratic freedom, to consider how state officials, Black activists, and others assign meaning to the racial politics of Black suffering. In so doing, she looks at the challenge that contemporary feminist activists face in attempting to make visible Black women within the Black political sphere.”
Katie Crawford
Former GSS Chair Katie Crawford named interim director of Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities.
“Crawford, the author of four books, is an accomplished scholar of gender and sexuality, European history, and visual and popular culture. Crawford is also a dedicated teacher and past winner of the Jeffrey Nordhaus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at Vanderbilt.
“I am thrilled to serve as interim director of the Robert Penn Warren Center,” said Crawford. “I believe that the humanities are more important now than ever, as we look for innovative and interdisciplinary solutions to the social, political, and environmental challenges of the 21st century. I look forward to addressing these issues through my leadership of the center.”
Julie Gamble
Assistant Professor Julie Gamble’s research on urban mobility profiled by the College of Arts and Science.
“Julie Gamble, Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies, shares her experience biking through Quito, Ecuador with a women’s cyclist group to understand first-hand how urban mobility and infrastructure can help reduce gender inequality.