The Department of Gender and Women's Studies welcomes Professor Mahruq Khan to our faculty! Professor Khan is a sociologist, working at the intersections of gender, religion, and race. In particular, her work has centered on LGBTQ+ Muslims; feminism in Islam; anti-Muslim racism; and anti-immigrant sentiment, with a focus on new religious immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. We asked her...

  Blair Ebony Smith is an Assistant Professor in Art Education and Gender and Women’s Studies. She was previously a 2019 DRIVE Postdoctoral Fellow in Art Education in the School of Art + Design. Smith comes with a PhD in Education from Syracuse University and extensive experience in the Champaign-Urbana community. She has pursued public engagement as part of the SOLHOT collective (...

My research focuses on modern Latin American and U.S. Latinx literary and visual cultures with a specialization on Mexico, queer theory, performance studies, and critical theory. I enjoy writing on issues of embodiment, sexuality, race, and performance in contemporary visual art and literature.

My research focuses the critical lens of transgender studies on questions of state power, science, and technology, and on transnational flows of knowledge, bodies, and capital. Currently, I am pursuing these interests through work on surveillance and security mechanisms and new research on the development and use of synthetic hormones. I earned a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from the University of...

I am a historian of Southern Africa and I specialize in gender history, women’s history, and institutional culture. Specifically, right now I am working on a book on higher education during the Apartheid period in South Africa. I also have an interest in and have and will teach a course in memory, autobiography, and memoir; I guess it’s what people used to call “self-writing”; people writing...

  The African-American Studies Program at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She received her Ph.D. in Women's Studies from York University, Toronto, Ontario, in 2003. Her research interests include migration and travel, Black Canada, health, popular culture, feminist, Diasporic and post-colonial studies. Dr. Flynn’s book: Moving Beyond Borders: Black Canadian and Caribbean...

Mimi Thi Nguyen is Interim Chair of Gender and Women's Studies and Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her first book, called ...