Women's & Gender Studies Faculty & Staff

Summer is an assistant professor of Communication whose interests include social justice and transformation, relationality, and creative forms of inquiry. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of South Florida. She teaches classes in gender and communication, interpersonal communication, and communication theory and methods. Though the politics of motherhood has been a central focus of her scholarship, Summer is more broadly interested in how we communicate gender and how gender communicates us—in other words, she is interested in how gender organizes society, dis/empowers, impacts relationships, and shapes identities. Her research connected to gender has explored: dancing, motherhood, embodiment and bodies, performance, activism, music, art, writing, sexualities, and relationships.

Dr. Tracy Betsinger is a Professor of Anthropology, specializing in Biological Anthropology. She competed her B.A. in Anthropology and Indian Studies at the University of North Dakota, her B.S. in Biology from the University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse, her M.A. in Anthropology from the University of Tennessee, and her Ph.D. in Anthropology from The Ohio State University. Prior to joining our department, Dr. Betsinger held a post-doctoral research position with the Global History of Health Project in conjunction with The Ohio State University. She joined our department in Fall 2008.

Dr. Betsinger’s research interests include bioarchaeology, paleopathology, mortuary archaeology, and skeletal biology. She investigates the health and well-being of past populations by examining patterns of disease, stress and deprivation, and trauma. She is interested in the effects of gender, social status, and settlement patterns on these aspects of health. Her research has also focused on the mortuary treatment of perinatal or fetal burials.

Currently, Dr. Betsinger is involved in a project examining a skeletal sample from 18th-19th century Halifax, Nova Scotia, focusing on the health patterns of mothers and infants (with Dr. Amy B. Scott, University of New Brunswick). She has also examined the effects of urbanization on health patterns in medieval Poland, and she has investigated atypical mortuary burial patterns, such as the “vampire” burials of post-medieval Poland.

Suzanne is an associate professor in the English Department where she teaches classes in professional writing and modern world literature. She earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan. Her research interests include gender and science, as well as gender in modernist literature from Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. She has published on gender in early X-ray crystallography and on the Egyptian short story writer Alifa Rifaat. She developed and teaches WLIT 2042, Muslim Women Writers.

Kristen is an assistant professor of Communication Studies. She received her Ph.D. in Communication at the University of South Florida. Kristen holds an MA in Medical Anthropology from the Universiteit van Amsterdam and a BA in Creativity Studies from Goddard College. Her research has explored a wide range of topics related to gender, including: partner preferences regarding body hair removal or retention; pole dancing as a recreational fitness activity; online women's health forums centered on alternative birth control methods; and gendered body modification practices such as tattooing, circumcision, and cosmetic surgery. Currently, Kristen's work focuses on cultural sustainability practices, communication and the construction of difference, contemplative philosophy, and activism for social justice work. She teaches classes in Gender Communication, Intercultural Communication, Communication Theory, Listening Theory, New Media, and Public Speaking. For more information about her current work, please visit: www.yogaactivism.com.

Michael is an associate professor and social-cognitive psychologist who completed his Ph.D. at CUNY. He is interested in how individuals make attributions and judgments when presented with novel, complex, and contradictory information. His research has primarily focused on individuals' decision-making processes, prototypes, impression formation, and attitudes--particularly as they apply to issues involving gender, sexuality, and the law.

Bio: Maria Paula Chaves Daza is a Latinx feminist scholar, holds a Master in Philosophy from the Philosophy, Interpretation and Culture program, and has a Doctorate in English from the Department of English, General Literature, and Rhetoric at SUNY-Binghamton University. Born in Colombia, they had the privilege to live in large immigrant cities like Miami and Chicago. These immigrant communities and the matriarchs of their family have given them the perspective and exposure to quotidian feminist practices which inspire their scholarly and community work. Their scholarship is invested in listening to the many ways women of color tell stories and work towards social justice. Their areas of specialization are 20th Century Chicanx/Latinx Literature, Women of Color Feminist Literature/Theory, Transnationalism, Testimonio, Post-colonial/De-colonial Theory.

Charlene is a professor of Psychology. She received her BA in psychology from Bard College and earned a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from SUNY Albany. Much of Charlene's work specifically focuses on understanding how stereotyping and prejudice, interpersonal comparisons, and intergroup relations can change the way we perceive ingroup and outgroup members and our evaluations of the self. As a social psychologist who specializes in theories of social identity, her primary research interests center around the way in which individuals are evaluated as members of social groups.

Dr. Diamond-Lenow (she/they) is an Assistant Professor in Women’s and Gender Study. She has a Ph.D. in Feminist Studies from the University of California Santa Barbara, an MSc in Gender Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science and her BA in the Study of Women and Gender from Smith College.

Their research and teaching interests include feminist and queer theory, race and empire, cultural studies, postcolonial animal studies, feminist pedagogy, and queer somatics. She teaches courses including: Feminist Theories; Queer Theory; Trans and Women of Color Feminisms; Queer Cinema; Introduction to Queer Studies; Feminist Research Methods; and Gender, Power, and Difference.

Their work has been published in interdisciplinary journals and edited collections, including the Journal of Lesbian Studies, Race and Yoga, the Journal of Intercultural Studies, Humanimalia: A Journal of Human/Animal Interface Studies, the Global Journal of Animal Law, and the Routledge Companion to Gender and Affect. Her book project in-progress “Boundary Affects: Race, Sex, and Species in U.S. Empire,” analyzes the racialized borders of humanity and animality and frames of heteropatriarchal nationalisms in U.S. militarism during the U.S. occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan as part of the “war on terror.”

Sallie is a professor of Anthropology. Dr. Han currently serves as the Chair of the Council on Anthropology and Reproduction (CAR) and Co-Editor of Open Anthropology, the digital journal of the American Anthropological Association. She is the author of Pregnancy in Practice: Expectation and Experience in the Contemporary United States (Berghahn Books, 2013). Her major research and teaching interests include gender, reproduction, and kinship and relatedness. Other areas of interest include studies of material culture and consumption; science and technology studies; anthropology of media; and anthropology of friendship. Her current research incorporates the concerns of linguistic anthropology and medical anthropology and examines the involvement of pediatrics in efforts to promote literacy among children and parents in the U.S. At Oneonta, Dr. Han teaches courses in cultural anthropology (including ANTH 3303 Anthropology of Reproduction which is cross-listed with Women’s and Gender Studies), medical anthropology, and linguistic anthropology. Sallie earned her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan. A graduate of Williams College, where she majored in English with a concentration in women's studies, Dr. Han is a former staff writer for The Daily News in New York. Follow her on Twitter @SallieHanAnthro and on Academia.edu at oneonta.academia.edu/SallieHan.

Greg (he/him/his) is an assistant professor of Communication Studies, and earned his doctorate at Southern Illinois University. Broadly, Greg is interested in conceptualizations of identity, voice, agency, and social justice activism globally and locally. His research is framed within critical, interpretative, and performative paradigms that center questions of power, privilege, marginalization, and oppression across various intersecting identities including race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, religion, ethnicity, nationality, and size. His latest co-authored publication focuses on queering the bully-victim dichotomy to re-narrate and implicate each of us as ‘bully’ in hopes that we reflexively question our communicative engagement with each other differently. Greg also embraces a critical pedagogy in each of his courses. He is currently teaching Intercultural Communication, Rhetoric, Argumentation, Gender and Communication, and Perspectives on Communication.

Professor Kachwala is an Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies. She completed her Ph.D. in Gender Studies at Indiana University. Her work focuses on the interconnections between gender, violence, and political cultures. Her research interests include transnational and postcolonial feminisms; gender and colonialism; nationalisms; women’s history; cultural studies. She is working on a book project that analyzes the often-neglected militant or revolutionary struggle for Indian independence (1905-1947), specifically women’s engagement with violence by combining historical (archival sources) and media analysis (film and news). Professor Kachwala’s teaching includes courses on transnational feminisms; feminist theories; women’s political resistance; Bollywood and gender; and gender, power, society.

Cynthia is a New World archaeologist whose research interests include hunter-gatherers, environmental change, and gender in past societies. She developed and teaches the course WGS 3730: Women and Gender in Prehistory". She is a 2014 recipient of SUNY’s Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Adjunct Teaching. Professor Klink earned her MA in Anthropology from UC Santa Barbara.

Melissa is a deviance sociologist. She received her B.A. in 2003 from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and her Ph.D. in 2011 from University of Connecticut. She teaches diverse courses in sociology and criminology, including Gender and Crime, Drugs and Society, Police and Society, and Race, Crime and Justice. Her areas include crime and deviance, medicalization, delinquency, symbolic interaction, inequalities, and qualitative methods. She is an associate editor for the journal Deviant Behavior, and is on the editorial board for the journal Humanity and Society. Her work includes but is not limited to police raids and sex work, drug use and space, deviantization of marginalized youth, and renditions of gender, race, and sexuality in pop culture.

Quincy (ze/hir/hirs) is a lecturer in Trans Studies whose primary interests include intersex and trans narratives, histories, activisms, and solidarities; coalition-building and bodily autonomy within intersex justice and reproductive justice movements; and the intersections of sex/gender, race, and colonialism. Ze completed hir Ph.D. in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Oregon State University. Now ze teaches classes on trans and queer politics, trans feminisms, queer theory, and gender, sexuality, and race in popular culture. Ze has also developed a seminar surveying Intersex Studies with focuses on intersex life narratives, histories, theories, and activisms. While the primary focus of hir work is on intersex and trans communities, ze is interested in exploring the meaning of solidarity and social justice more broadly both in hir research and teaching. Throughout hir work ze employs an intersex trans lens to challenge us to question our assumptions about power, commonality, difference, and solidarity and to reconsider the stories we tell ourselves about one another and our possibilities for solidarity. Hir scholarly work on intersex and trans intercommunity relations and the lessons on solidarity we can learn from intersex and trans communities has been published in Transgender Studies Quarterly and the Journal for Women and Gender Centers in Higher Education.

Dr. Basil Arnould Price joined the English department as Assistant Professor of Queer and Medieval Literature in 2025. Prior to joining the English department, Dr. Price was the inaugural John W. Baldwin Postdoctoral Fellow in the CMRS-Center for Early Global Studies at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He received his PhD in Medieval Studies at the University of York in 2024, where he is now an Associate Researcher in the Centre for Medieval Studies.

Dr. Price's research and teaching interests broadly include the history and literatures of medieval to early modern England and Scandinavia; medieval languages, especially Old Norse, Old English, Middle English, and medieval Latin; theories of empire and colonialism; critical race and Indigenous studies; trans and queer theories and literatures. He is currently working on two monographs, the first of which examines how late medieval Old Norse sagas contested the nascent colonial relationship between Iceland and its Norwegian sovereigns not through polemics or outright resistance, but through the strategic expression of negative affects in rewritings of the political past. His second project charts how trans negativity provides a methodological rubric for understanding how concepts of ‘transness’ were defined, developed, and deployed across medieval Fennoscandia (including Greenland (Kalaallit Nunaat) and Sápmi, the traditional lands of the Sámi).

Dr. Price is the first editor of the co-edited volume Medieval Mobilities (Palgrave: 2023) and is also an Associate Editor for the peer-reviewed journal Medieval Feminist Forum. For more about Dr. Price and his work, see his website.

Jonathan is an associate professor of English and a specialist in eighteenth-century British literature. He earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at UMass Amherst. He teaches classes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature that emphasize shifting conceptions of fiction, poetry, theater, gender, print culture, philosophy, and empire, as well as courses on literary theory and postmodernism. He has published articles on genre, gender, puppets, and bagels. His chapter "The Epistemology of Genre" is part of the Pickering & Chatto book Theory and Practice in Eighteenth Century Britain: Writing Between Philosophy and Literature and explores the relationship between Lockean philosophy and eighteenth-century genre theory. His current research interests primarily involve eighteenth-century women writers like Eliza Fenwick, Charlotte Smith, and Eliza Haywood.

Ursula is an assistant professor and developmental psychologist interested in how children learn about gender and how peoples’ ideas about gender change over time. She does research relating to reactions to stereotype violations, societal devaluation of femininity, perceptions of masculinity and femininity, and gender in the workforce.

Elizabeth is an associate professor of Sociology, received her Ph.D. from North Carolina State University in 2010. Her research and teaching interests include race, class, and gender; health and the human body; poverty and social welfare; and global inequality. She teaches sociology of gender, sexuality studies, sociology of family, social policy, and other sociology courses.

Dr. Tredennick is an associate professor of English who has published on Dickens and Scott. She teaches courses on nineteenth-century British literature, including a class on Jane Austen and another on Madness in Literature. She is currently developing a new course on the Brontes.

Betty Wambui, Ph.D. is Associate Professor in the Africana and Latinx Studies Department at the State University of New York - Oneonta. A Carnegie Diaspora Fellow (2021) and UUP/SUNY Drescher Recipient (2014/15), she received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Binghamton University (SUNY), USA; and her M.A. in Philosophy from the University of Nairobi, Kenya. Her areas of specialization within Social and Political Philosophy include African Philosophies, Feminist Philosophies, Critical Race Theories and Critical Legal Studies. She has a particular interest in social contract theory, discrimination, and morality. A member of the Women's Caucus of the African Studies Association and former co-convenor; she also served as President of the New York Africana Studies Association. Executive Editor of Praxis: Journal of Gender and Cultural Studies; her publications include - “Feminist Biographies – Telling our Stories” in Gender and Sexuality in Kenyan Societies (Besi Muhonja and Babacar M’Baye, Eds.) Lexington –2022; “Eastlands, Nairobi: Memory, History, and Recovery” in A Tapestry of African Histories: With Longer Times and Wider Geopolitics, (Nicholas Githuku, ed.) Lexington, 2021; "Buffeted: Women, knowledge and the environment – Developing an Afro Feminist Response to Environmental Questions" in African Philosophy and The Epistemic Marginalization of Women, (Jonathon Chimakonam, Thaddeus Metz and Louise du Toit, eds.) Routledge, 2018; “Arrow of God: An Exploration of Psycho-Social and Political Health” in Illuminations on Chinua Achebe: The Art of Resistance (Micere Githae Mugo and Herbert G. Ruffin II) Africa Press, 2017; “Conversations: Women, children, goats and land” in Listening to Ourselves: A Multilingual Anthology of African Philosophy (Chike Jeffers, ed.), SUNY Press, 2013; and “The Challenge of Provenance: myth, histories and the negotiation of socio-political space” in Phoebe: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Feminist Scholarship, Theory and Aesthetics Volume 19, Number 2 – Fall 2007.

Forthcoming –

“On Ngugi wa Thiongo’s Tongue and Pen” in Social Sciences Decentered (Stéphane Dufoix and Marcelo Rosa, Eds.) The Sorbourne University Press – Forthcoming 2023 (Invited)

The Gender and Sexuality Resource Center (GSRC) is a campus resource that supports exploration, discussion and critical thinking around gender and sexuality issues, broadly defined, through events and programming. We offer a resource library and a safe space for people of all gender identities and sexual expressions to gather and learn. Our mission is to educate and to advocate for gender and sexuality equity and inclusion for all members of SUNY Oneonta and the greater Oneonta community using an intersectional social justice approach.