Rupa Bagga is a Doctoral Candidate at the Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies at UBC. Her dissertation is titled “Disgrace or Privilege: Perspectives on Gender, Class, and Race in International Adoptions from South Korea to Canada.” She has special interests in modern Asia and adoptions from India. She received the Korea Foundation Fellowship for her fieldwork in Seoul for 2006-2007, and is the recipient of a Indo-Canadian Shastri Fellowship for her research interests on adoptions from India. She presented a paper titled: “Intersections of Gender, Race and Class in Canadian Adoptions from South Korea” at The 10th International Interdisciplinary Congress on Women, Women’s World 2008, from 3-9 July 2008 in Madrid, Spain. She is a member of Adoptive Family Association of British Columbia and participates in a few adoption related workshops in B.C. She brings particular language skills (Hindi, Punjabi, Korean) to her research and has spent a good deal of time in South Korea. Please contact Rupa at:rbagga@interchange.ubc.ca

Jade Boyd has a PhD from the Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies, UBC, where she currently teaches “Feminist Qualitative Research Methods” and “Women and Literature: The Body.” She has also been an instructor in the departments of Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University and Dance Studies at York University. Jade’s publications on the social and political implications of performance, social dance, embodiment, media and urban geography situate her as an emerging gender scholar within the scope of feminist performance studies. Her work has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and by the BC Arts Council. Jade remains creatively active as a member of the Vancouver-based performance collective, Project Rainbow.

Marilou Carrillo, PhD Candidate
email: ligaya@axion.net

Research Area
I am grounded in my studies with my Filipino women's community and am trying to integrate our activism with theories of anti-colonialism/anti-imperialism particularly questioning the colonizer/colonized dichotomy, use of democratized women's methodology of oral life histories, and a close examination of this transnational community's struggle for national liberation and resistance to ongoing "neo-" colonialism.

Eunkyung Choi, PhD Student

Sanzida Z Habib, PhD Candidate
email: habib_sanzida@yahoo.ca

Research Area
Health care service utilization by immigrant women in Canada.

Bjorg Hjartardottir is starting her first year in the PhD Program at the Centre for Women's and Gender Studies. She currently holds an RA position for Dr. Sneja Gunew and has received the Graduate Entrance Scholarship. Bjorg has presented her research at a Gender Studies conference at the University of Iceland, which was followed up with an academic publication in the Icelandic journal Ritid. Her general research interests are women and multiculturalism; feminist postcolonial theories; and women and Islam.

 

Xin Huang, PhD Candidate
email: huangxin@interchange.ubc.ca

Research Area
My research interests are in the interrelation between visual and verbal narratives, with a special focus on gender project in Contemporary China. In my doctoral research I will analyze women's visual and verbal narratives in post-Mao era and their relations to the Maoist gender project.

Hui Ling Lin, PhD Candidate
email: huilingl@interchange.ubc.ca

Research Area
I am always interested in the relations among space, the racialized body, and gender/sexuality in a cross-cultural context, and how they manifest in various representations such as films, novels, and pop culture in our daily life.  My doctoral research aims to explore the representations of Asian queer women by migrant and immigrant Asian queer women in contemporary Canada with a focus on the body. This research is grounded in various theories such as queer theory, transnational theory, feminist film theory, Third World feminism, and media studies.

Naomi Lloyd, PhD Candidate
email: nlloyd@shaw.ca

Research Area
I am interested in the role of religious discourse in the constitution of women's sexual desire, as represented in the literary works of women novelists in the Victorian era and contemporary lesbian writing. Broader areas of interest are: queer theory (especially queer literary theory and queer theories of the body), queer and feminist theology, representations of sexual deviance and Marxist theories of social change.

Sally Mennill is a PhD Candidate at UBC's Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies. Her research focuses on women's health history and the history of childbirth in Canada; her dissertation focuses specifically on caesarean sections in post-war Canada. She is currently finalizing her research and will spend the 2008-9 school year writing. Sally is grateful to have had her research funded in 2007-8 by a Hannah Senior General Scholarship and will be funded in 2008-9 by a SSHRCC Doctoral Award. Sally has forthcoming publications in a volume on Motherhood in Popular Culture from McGill-Queen's University Press, and with her supervisor, Dr. Veronica Strong-Boag in the Canadian Bulletin on Medical History. Sally is a labour and post-partum doula, active in the Vancouver doula community.

Cecily Nicholson, PhD Candidate
email: cecily@shaw.ca

Research Area
In research and work I consider: women and women’s narratives on “exiting” the sex trade; structural violence; precarity and gendered and racialized divisions of labour; legislated poverty within global neoliberalism; “alternative” circuits of labour; racialization of poverty and the “intensification of visual difference”; feminist anti-colonialism/imperialism; methodologies and theories of organizing.

Emilia Nielsen is a PhD student at the Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies at UBC. She will write Qualifying Papers in “Feminist and Queer Approaches to Cultural Studies” and “Critical Studies in Gender and Sexuality,” and is developing a course syllabus entitled “Sexing Canadian Literature: Women Write Desire.” She currently holds a Canada Graduate Scholarship from SSHRC. Her creative work has appeared in The Antigonish Review, Contemporary Verse 2, Event, Descant, The Fiddlehead, Grain, Prairie Fire, Prism International, Qwerty, Room Magazine, and This Side of West. Surge Narrows, a book-length collection of poetry, is being considered by Canadian publishers. She has a piece of critical writing forthcoming in the special issue “Gendering Border Crossings” of Re-public (Greece). Emilia is an executive member of UBC’s Gender Performances Project. Her current research interests include: critical utopias, explicit bodies, queer performances, and queering pornography.

Bianca Rus, PhD Candidate
email: bianca@interchange.ubc.ca

Research Area
Broadly, my research focuses on three main discourses: feminist epistemology, psychoanalysis and literary theory. More specifically, I'm looking at trauma studies at the intersections of these discourses.

Sam Semper is a PhD candidate at the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies (CWAGS) and Researcher at the Centre for Studies in Race, Autobiography, Gender and Age (RAGA). Her research interests include psychoanalytic theory, critical race/whiteness studies, theories of affect and emotion, and autobiographical practices. Sam is an executive member of UBC’s Gender Performances Project and Women’s and Gender Studies Graduate Student Association (WAGS-GSA), and was the Coordinating Editor of Ampersand. Her doctoral research is funded by a University Graduate Fellowship.

Sirijit Sunanta is a PhD candidate in Women’s and Gender Studies at UBC. She is currently working on her PhD thesis on transnational marriages between Northeastern Thai women and foreign men in the context of changing agrarian life in Thai Northeastern villages. A recipient of a Thai government scholarship, Sirijit intends to pursue an academic career in the area of Women’s and Gender Studies in Thailand. Sirijit is the author of the Canada Council of Southeast Asian Studies (CCSEAS) working paper “The Globalization of Thai Cuisine,” and co-author of “‘Exotic Love at Your Fingertips’: Intermarriage Websites, Gender Representation, and the Transnational Migration of Filipino and Thai Women” in Kasarinlan: Philippines Journal of Third World Studies (2007). Her main research interests include: a feminist approach to migration studies; transnationalism and globalization in Asian contexts; and feminism and gender studies in Thailand.

Manuela Valle is starting her second year in the PhD program in the fall of 2008. She holds an MA in Social Psychology from Universidad Arcis in Chile and an MA in Women's and Gender Studies from UBC, and has earned two University Graduate Fellowships at UBC. Manuela is a founding member of the Gender Performances Research and Reflection Group and has served both as MA and PhD Representative for the Women's and Gender Studies Graduate Student Association (WAGS-GSA). Manuela is currently preparing for her qualifying exams in the areas of “Chilean Dictatorship and Political Transition” and “Queer and Postcolonial Theories,” and is developing a course entitled “Gender and Sexuality in 20th Century Latin America.” Manuela has presented her graduate work at conferences at UBC and UCLA. She is a Teaching Assistant in Critical Studies in Sexuality and has been a guest lecturer in Latin American gender issues both at UBC and Langara College. Her main research interests include: psychoanalysis, Marxism, and feminism; gender discourses and nation-building in Chile; state violence and the body politic; and queering and performance as political resistance. Manuela recently became the mother of Ramona Oltra and has been further politicized as a “lactivist.”

Abby Wener Herlin is in the PhD program at the Centre for Women's and Gender Studies at UBC. Currently, she is preparing to write Qualifying Papers in the areas of "Identity and Intersectionality" and “Historical/Constructed ‘Waves’ of Feminism” and is developing a course syllabus entitled "Introducing and Troubling Girls' Studies". Abby is a published poet whose work has appeared in Zygote, Malahat Review, Fireweed, Canadian Women's Studies, The Antigonish Review and Room Magazine. Her most recent collection of poems, To the Root, was published in 2005 by Motif Press. Abby works at various non-profit organizations where she conducts creative writing workshops with youth. She is interested in adolescent girls’s relationship (or lack thereof) to feminism and is currently making a film on this topic. Her current research interests include: girls’ studies, identity and intersectionality theory, popular culture and narrative inquiry.

Almas Zakiuddin is a “mature” Doctoral Candidate at the Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies at UBC. She is currently writing her dissertation on religion, gender and international development. She received the C.D. Howe Graduate Fellowship in Public Policy (2006-2007) and the University Graduate Fellowship (2004-2007). Her work has appeared in Views from the Edge (2004, 2006, 2007), Feminist Theory (2007) and Pacific Affairs (2007). Almas has taught as a Sessional Instructor in Women’s Studies at both UBC and Simon Fraser University. Her current research interests include: gender, religion and international development; Third World Muslim women; Bangladesh and South Asia; and Islamic society and culture.

Former students (listed by year)

Chris Shelley, PhD 2006

Research Area
I am interested in feminist theory as a standpoint to support Trans (transgender/transsexual/intersex) embodiment, experience and selfhood. My dissertation focusses on trans repudiation using interdisciplinarity – critical hermeneutic theory – qualitiative methods – and activism – to support social justice/change for transfolk.

Kim Snowden, PhD Graduate 2007
email: klsn@shaw.ca

Research Area
My research interests include feminist literary studies and criticism, representation and visual culture, and feminist film theory. My dissertation research focuses on representations of women, adultery and space in literature and film.  I am also a sessional lecturer in the Women's Studies undergraduate program, and co-founder and chief co-editor of the on-line feminist journal, thirdspace (www.thirdspace.ca)

Lauren Hunter Eberle, PhD Graduate 2007
email: tiggers_fort@hotmail.com

Research Area
Her research focuses on intersections of multiculturalism, migration, ethnic diversity, and the performing arts in Canada.

Jade Boyd, PhD Graduate 2008
email: jadeboyd@interchange.ubc.ca

Research Area
I am interested in the social and political implications of performance with an emphasis on cultural representations of dance and the body (in motion); critical feminist theory, performance theory, and cultural theory.