Holstein Dissertation Fellowship Mentors 2018-2019
Jennifer A. Thompson is Assistant Professor in the Jewish Studies Interdisciplinary Program at California State University, Northridge, where she holds the Maurice Amado Professorship in Applied Jewish Ethics and Civic Engagement. Her current research interests include the rhetorical uses of the idea of diversity in public Jewish discourse; atypical forms of Jewish association or togetherness; and Jewish education programs about sexuality. These interests grow out of her published work, which includes Jewish on Their Own Terms: How Intermarried Couples Are Changing American Judaism (Rutgers University Press, 2014); Applied Ethics (2017[2014]) a peer-reviewed and self-published multimedia ethics workbook; Mapping the Jewish Valley, a peer-reviewed online map of Jewish sites in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles; scholarly articles about women’s religious leadership and the ethics of language in social scientific and public discourse; and op-eds about ethics and sexual harassment, doxxing, and intermarriage. She was educated at Brandeis University (BA), Harvard Divinity School (MTS), and Emory University (Ph.D.).
David K. Seitz is a cultural geographer with interests in questions of difference, desire, and citizenship, broadly conceived. He is Assistant Professor of Cultural Geography in the Department of Humanities, Social Sciences and the Arts at Harvey Mudd College, and contributes to the intercollegiate American Studies and Women’s/Gender/Feminist Studies programs at the Claremont Colleges. His first book, A House of Prayer for All People: Contesting Citizenship in a Queer Church (2017, Minnesota) examines the affective and spatial dimensions of belonging at a large, predominantly LGBT church in Toronto, Canada.
Tamara C. Ho is an Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature is from UCLA, and she participates in multiple interdisciplinary units at UCR: Queer and Transgender Studies in Religion, Southeast Asian studies, the Comparative Literature department, the Speculative Fiction and Cultures of Science program, and Medical and Health Humanities. Her areas of expertise include critical ethnic/race studies, literature, Southeast Asia and its diaspora, Anglophone postcoloniality, science fiction, religion, gender, and sexuality. Ho’s monograph Romancing Human Rights: Gender, Intimacy, and Power Between Burma and the West was published by the University of Hawai’i Press in 2015. Her research also appears in the journals Signs, PMLA, Discourse, and Science Fiction Studies, and in various collections in Asian American studies. Recent essays and projects also explore Burmese transgendered shamanism, speculative fiction, techno-orientalism, migration, and Asian American mental health from a femiqueer arts/humanities perspective.
Erin Runions is Professor and Chair in the Department of Religious Studies at Pomona College. She explores how biblical interpretation and citation in the U.S. shapes political subjectivity, gender, sexuality, national sovereignty, and biopolitics. Her publications include The Babylon Complex: Theopolitical Fantasies of War, Sex and Sovereignty (Fordham, 2014), How Hysterical: Identification and Resistance in the Bible and Film (Palgrave, 2003), and Changing Subjects: Gender, Nation, Future in Micah (Sheffield, 2001).
Andrea Smith is currently chair of Ethnic Studies at UCR. Her latest books Unreconciled: The Christian Right and Racial Reconciliation and Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler Colonialism and Anti-Blackness (co-edited) are coming out with Duke University Press and Evangelical Theologies of Liberation (co-edited) is coming out with IVP Press. She is also the author and editor of several books including Native Americans and the Christian Right, Conquest, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, Theorizing Native Studies, and Native Studies Keywords.
Emily Thuma is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Her research interests center on gender, race, and sexuality in twentieth-century U.S. history; feminist studies; queer studies; social movements and the state; and criminalization and imprisonment