Core Faculty
Jane Caputi, Professor, Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Communication
Dr. Caputi is a Professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Florida Atlantic University. Dr. Caputi’s primary research is in contemporary American cultural studies, including popular culture, gender and violence, and ecofeminism. Dr. Caputi has written many articles and authored four books: Call Your Mutha' : A Deliberately Dirty-Minded Manifesto for the Earth Mother in the Anthropocene; The Age of Sex Crime; Gossips, Gorgons, and Crones: The Fates of the Earth; and Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power and Popular Culture. She also has made two educational documentaries, The Pornography of Everyday Life (2006) and Feed the Green: Feminist Voices for the Earth (2015). In 2008 she curated the popular culture section of an exhibit “Political Circus 2008: Hating Hillary, Baiting Barak, and Pandering with Palin” and followed this up in 2016 with From (Castrating) Bitch to (Big) Nuts and Beyond: Political Sideshow 2016, co-curated with Adrienne Gionta. Both of these exhibits were sponsored by the Schmidt Galleries, Florida Atlantic University. A new exhibit sponsored by the Schmidt Galleries “Political Pandemonium: Presidential Popular Culture from 2008-2008” opens online on Oct. 1 2020, http://fau.edu/artsandletters/galleries/
Jane Caputi's newest book Call Your “Mutha’: A Deliberately Dirty-Minded Manifesto for the Earth Mother in the Anthropocene, was published by Oxford University Press in a series on “Heretical Thought.” Please visit this link for more information.
Dr. Caputi was FAU’s Distinguished Teacher for 2001, and received FAU’s Research and Scholarly Activities award (Professor level) for 2005 and for 2012. In 2013, she was named “Feminist of the Year” by the Palm Beach County National Organization for Women (NOW). In 2016, she was named Eminent Scholar of the Year by the American Culture/Popular Culture Association and in 2020 the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology selected her for their Saga Award 2020 for Special Contributions to Women’s History and Culture.
Luisa Turbino Torres, Assistant Professor, Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Political Science
Dr. Turbino Torres (she/they) received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Delaware in 2022. She was born and raised in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, where she went to the Federal University of Minas Gerais for her bachelor's and Master's degrees. She specializes in transnational feminist politics, activism, and social movements, culture and politics, and Latin American domestic and international politics. She employs interpretivist methodologies and explores how power dynamics present in different cultural spaces have effects that go beyond the individuals and feed into many systems of oppression. Her most recent work looks at the political participation and resistance of women and LGBTQ+ communities around soccer in Brazil to address gender, sexuality, and other intersections, and it is based on 2 years of digital ethnography, interviews, and archival work. You can learn more about Dr. Turbino Torres' work on her website and follow her on Twitter.
Executive Committee
In addition to the core Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies faculty, a dedicated group of FAU staff and professors serve on the WGGS executive committee in order to facilitate the research, curriculum and programming goals of the WGSS Center.
- Kenneth Frankel, Collection Development Librarian
- Yolanda Gamboa, Department of Languages, Linguistics and Comparative Literature
- Marquese McFerguson, School of Communication & Multimedia Studies
- Kate Polak, Department of English
- Lotus Seeley, Department of Sociology
- Mashaekh Hassan, WGSS Graduate Student Representative
- Amanda Ciocca, WGSS Graduate Student Representative
Faculty Affiliates
In addition to the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies faculty, there are faculty affiliates. They include faculty in the departments across the university. Their representation signifies the truly interdisciplinary nature of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Some of the affiliates include:
Department of Anthropology
- Meredith A.B. Ellis, Ph.D., Syracuse University
- Adriana Garriga-Lopez, Ph.D., Columbia University in New York
- Katharina Rynkiewich, Ph.D., Washington University in St. Louis
School of Communication and Multimedia Studies
- Carolina Estrada-Gutsche, MA, Lancaster University UK, Phd (ABD) Lancaster University UK
- Nanetta Durnell-Uwechue, Ph.D., Ohio State University
- Marquese McFerguson, Ph.D., University of South Florida
School of Criminology and Criminal Justice
- Dawn L. Rothe, PhD., Western Michigan University
- Calli Cain, PhD.,University of Nebraska at Omaha
Department of Counselor Education
- Carmen Gill, Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Department of Curriculum, Culture, & Educational Inquiry
- Traci Baxley, Ed.D., Florida Atlantic University
- Dilys Schoorman, Ph.D., Purdue University
- Bianca Nightengale-Lee, Department of Curriculum, Culture, & Educational Inquiry
Department of Economics
- Ting Levy, Ph.D., University of Florida
College of Engineering and Computer Science
- Jessica Brynes, M.Ed., Women in Engineering and Computer Science Coordinator
- Nurgan Erdol, Ph.D., University of Akron, Ohio
Department of English
- Barclay Barrios, Ph.D., Rutgers University
- Eric Berlatsky, Ph.D., University of Maryland
- Sika Dagbovie-Mullins, Ph.D., University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign
- Andrew Furman, Ph.D., Pennsylvania State University
- Taylor Hagood, Ph.D., University of Mississippi
- Wendy Hinshaw, Ph.D., Ohio State University
- Timothy Miller, Ph.D., University of Notre Dame
- Romeo Oriogun, M.F.A., University of Iowa
- Kate Polak, Ph.D., University of Cincinnati
- Richard Shusterman, Ph.D.Phil., Oxford University
- Taryne Jade Taylor, Ph.D., University of Iowa
- Carla María Thomas, Ph.D., New York University
Department of History
- Adrian Finucane, Ph.D., Harvard University
- Patricia Kollander, PhD., Brown University
- Ben Lowe, PhD., Georgetown University
- Barbara Ganson, PhD., University of Texas, Austin
Department of Jewish Studies
- Rachel Harris, DPhil, University of Oxford
Department of Languages, Linguistics & Comparative Literature
- Carla Calargé, Ph.D., University of Iowa
- Yolanda Gamboa, Ph.D., Purdue University
- Nuria Godon, Ph.D., University of Colorado at Boulder
- Mary Ann Gosser-Esquilín, Ph.D., Yale University
- Michael Horswell, Ph.D., University of Maryland, College Park
- Marcella Munson, Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles
- Michael Rapoport, Ph.D., Yale University
College of Nursing
- Kyndall Mammah, Ph.D.
Department of Political Science
- Olyvia Christley, Ph.D., University of Virginia
- Luzmarina Garcia, Ph.D., University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
- Rebecca LeMoine, Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison
- Angela Nichols, Ph.D., The University of North Texas
- Annette LaRocco, Ph.D., University of Cambridge
College of Social Work & Criminal Justice
- Allan Barsky, Ph.D., University of Toronto
Department of Sociology
- Robert Caputi, Ph.D., UC Santa Barbara
- Yangsook Kim, Ph.D., University of Toronto
- Carter Koppelman, Ph.D., University of California-Berkeley
- Lotus Seeley, Ph.D., University of Michigan
- Patricia Widener, Ph.D., Brown University
Department of Visual Arts and Art History
- Karen Leader, Ph.D., New York University
University Galleries
- Véronique Côté, M.F.A University at Buffalo, M.A. Harvard University
Wilkes Honors College
- Sondra Washington, Ph.D., University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa
Affiliate Faculty
William L. Leap, PhD, is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the American University (Washington, DC) and an Affiliate Professor in the Center for Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Florida Atlantic University (Boca Raton, FL). He is the founding senior editor of the Journal of Language & Sexuality and, since 1993, has coordinated the annual program of the Lavender Language Conference. His writings about language and sexuality address topics as varied as race/class inequities, gender differences, language socialization, homophobia/hate speech, gay pornography, trans-national circulations, subaltern voice, and problems of queer historiography. Key publications include American Indian English (1993), Word’s Out: Gay Men’s English (1996), Out in Public: Reinventing Lesbian/Gay Anthropology in a Globalizing World (co-edited with Ellen Lewin), Speaking in Queer Tongues: Gay Language and Globalization (co-edited with Tom Boellstorff), and the widely reprinted papers “Language, socialization and silence in gay adolescence,’ “Queering gay men’s English,"and “Homophobia as moral geography.” He is currently completing a multi-disciplinary study of language, identity and same-sex desire in the US military, in Renaissance-era Harlem, in women’s softball teams, in cruising sites, and in other locations “before” Stonewall.