Faculty and Staff

Candace Moore’s scholarship examines queer and transgender representations in film and television. Her work has appeared in Cinema Journal, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Feminist Media Histories, and assorted anthologies, including Televising Queer Women and Production Studies.

Candace received her PhD in Film, Television, and Digital Media from UCLA, where she held a Research Associate position at the Center for the Study of Women. Candace previously worked as a journalist and entertainment editor for national LGBTQ magazines. At Carleton she offers courses in feminist and LGBTQ history, theory, media, and culture.

Iveta Jusová, Ph.D., directs the annual Women’s and Gender Studies in Europe program (WGSE). As part of the WGSE program, she teaches feminist and queer theory and feminist methodology. On campus, she teaches Introduction to GWSS.

Iveta’s scholarship covers study broad and gender, Czech and British women writers and feminist philosophers, and she is an expert on East Central Europe. Her current research explores memory in relation to postsocialism in the CEE region, focusing on postsocialist nostalgia and Mark Fisher’s concept of haunting

Cynthia Marrero-Ramos specializes in critical philosophy of race, feminist philosophy (esp. Latina/x feminisms), and African American philosophy (esp. Caribbean).

Meera Sehgal (B.A., Ferguson College, India; M.A., Pune University, India; M.A. & Ph.D. in Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2004) has a joint appointment in the Sociology & Anthropology department and in the Women’s & Gender studies program. Her research interests are in the areas of gender, race, class & sexuality; social movements; globalization; militarism; transnational feminisms and India. Based on ethnographic methods, her research examines the mobilization of women in the right-wing Hindu nationalist movement in India. Her more recent fieldwork centers on a South Asian transnational feminist network and its consciousness-raising work in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Meera emphasizes interdisciplinary feminist perspectives in her teaching and travels regularly to India for research and familial purposes. She teaches courses on social movements, women’s health in the U.S., qualitative methods, transnational feminist theory, and feminist approaches to knowledge production, globalization and militarization.

Sharon Akimoto (Ph.D., University of Utah) teaches courses in social cognition, social behavior and interpersonal processes, the psychology of prejudice, American and Asian-American studies. Her research interests include the formation and perpetuation of social stereotypes, cross-cultural understanding/misunderstanding and well-being, and Asian-American psychology.

Sonja Anderson (UCLA, B.A.; University of Notre Dame, M.T.S.; Yale University, M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.) teaches courses in ancient Christianity and Judaism, religious violence, gender and Catholicism, apocalypticism, and religion and medicine. Her current book project, Idol Talk: False Worship in the Early Christian World, will be published with Edinburgh University Press and explores how ancient Christians and Jews used idolatry polemic to claim a distinctive identity for themselves over against their pagan peers and how scholarly narratives have replicated this claim to uniqueness. At the moment, she is interested in the history of Catholic book publishing in 20th–21st-century America. Her favorite place to be is in conversation with students and colleagues about the weirdness of how we imagine ancient religion. She is a Benedictine oblate of Saint John’s Abbey.

Kristin Bloomer (Wesleyan University, B.A; University of Montana, M.F.A; Cambridge University, B.A, M.A; University of Chicago, Ph.D.) teaches courses in Christianities and religions of South Asia, with specializations in spirit possession and women’s and gender studies. Her research pertains to Christianity, Hinduism, and spirit possession in postcolonial south India; her more general interests lie in exploring historically specific articulations of subjectivity, with particular attention to religiosity, gender, and embodiment. She is the author of Possessed by the Virgin:  Hinduism, Roman Catholicism, and Marian Spirit Possession in South India (New York:  Oxford University Press, 2018), a book about Marian spirit possession in Tamil Nadu, India’s most southeastern state.  She is currently working on another research project about Hindu family deities and their attendant possession practices. Theoretically, her work addresses questions of religion and postcoloniality, ritual and performativity, feminist approaches to ethnography, and relationships between religion, gender, and the body. Her methods aim to explore and interrogate ideas of agency and of subjectivity that pertain not only to the postcolonial “Other,” but also to the anthropologist-scholar.

Emily Coccia teaches and writes on nineteenth-century genres of working-class and mass-popular literature; queer history; and contemporary fan cultures. Her book project considers how American working women’s fannish reception practices allowed them to envision queer and trans futures and to cultivate spaces for pleasure and intimacy. Degrees: Georgetown University, B.A. and M.A.; University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), Ph.D. in English and Women’s and Gender Studies

Mihaela Czobor-Lupp holds a PhD in Government from Georgetown University and a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Bucharest (Romania). Professor Czobor-Lupp is the author of Imagination in Politics: Freedom or Domination? (Lexington Books, 2014) and The Mirror and The Shadow. E.T.A. Hoffmann: The Phenomenology of the Romantic Ego (Univers, 1998). She also co-edited with J. Stefan Lupp, Moral, Legal, and Political Values in Romanian Culture (The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, Washington, DC, 2002). Her work has been published in The Review of Politics, Contemporary Political Theory, European Journal of Political Theory, Perspectives on European Politics and Society, and numerous other peer-reviewed journals in English and Romanian. Currently, Professor Czobor-Lupp works on two projects. In one of them she explores, through a comparative discussion of Hannah Arendt and the Romanian Jewish writer, Mihail Sebastian, the ability of thinking to counteract extreme politics and ideologies. In the other project, she explores the possibilities of reimagining the idea of Europe from within places, such as the Balkans, which are at the edge of Europe and on its periphery and are characterized by an unsettling, ambiguous, and creative in-betweenness and hybridity. Besides the introductory classes to political philosophy, Professor Czobor-Lupp teaches classes on post-modern political thought, imagination, memory, and politics, cosmopolitanism, religion and politics, the relationship between power and freedom.

Carol Donelan teaches Introduction to Cinema & Media Studies, Film Genres, Film History I, Film History II, Film Noir, Cinema Studies Seminar, and first-year seminars on Epic Films in World Culture and American Film Genres. Her interests include melodrama and film noir as modes of visual storytelling and archival research on the history of moviegoing and film exhibition. Among her publications are essays in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media, A Critical Companion to James Cameron, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Film History: An International Journal, The Moving Image, and Film Criticism.

Ross Elfline offers courses in the history of art and architecture since 1945.  His current research focuses on Radical Architecture in Italy, Austria, Britain and America in the 1960s and 70s, with particular emphasis on the Italian avant-garde collective Superstudio. His additional research interests include conceptual art in America and Europe; the history and theory of the neo-avantgarde; sound art; and post-structuralist, feminist and queer theories.

I was born and raised in Massachusetts. At Carleton, I teach a number of courses dealing with American cultural and political history, with a focus on issues of sexuality, gender, memory, immigration, and film.

My scholarship focuses on culture and identity in twentieth century America. I’ve written on a variety of topics, including 1950s gossip magazines, spirituality and gender in the work of filmmaker Terrence Malick, masculine nationalism in James Joyce’s fiction, and national identity in German war cemetery design. I also have interests in contemporary fiction, 20th century American art, the US War on Terror, and the history of Lebanon.

My first book, Gossip Men: J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn, and the Politics of Insinuation, was released in 2021 by the University of Chicago Press.

Adriana Estill teaches courses on U.S. Latino/a literature and twentieth century American literature, especially poetry. She also teaches in the American Studies program. She has published essays on Sandra Cisneros and Ana Castillo and recently contributed to the Gale encyclopedia of Latino/a authors with scholarly entries on Sandra María Esteves and Giannina Braschi. Her interest in popular culture has led to published articles on Mexican telenovelas and their literary origins as well as to current research into the perceptions and constructions of Latina beauty in contemporary Latino literature and the mass media. Degrees: Stanford B.A.; Cornell, M.A., Ph.D.

Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg received her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1990. She has been working on reproductive health issues since the 1980s, first as a Peace Corps volunteer in Cameroon, and later as an anthropologist. Her research focuses on connections between reproduction and belonging, especially when these are called into question by reproductive difficulties (e.g., infertility), ethnic stereotyping of fertility, or the challenges of migration. She also conducts research on how collective memory shapes rumors (e.g., about vaccines), with public health impact. She has conducted research in both rural and urban Cameroon, as well as with Cameroonian immigrants in Berlin, Paris, and South Africa. She teaches courses on gender, Africa, African diasporas/migration, medical anthropology, reproduction, and social science writing.

Summer Forester completed her Ph.D. in Political Science at Purdue University. Upon graduation, Forester joined the Purdue Policy Research Institute where she worked on a Gates Foundation funded project that examines the role of women’s movements and transnational feminist activism in promoting women’s economic empowerment around the world.

Forester’s current book project (based on her award-winning dissertation), Security Threats and The Policy Agenda: Understanding State Action on Women’s Rights in the Middle East, explains how militarism and security issues affect the adoption of women’s rights in semi-authoritarian regimes. Using both statistical analyses and primary data collected during 18 months of fieldwork as a Fulbright scholar in Jordan, her work shows how debates about women’s rights are informed by the security context in which policymakers and activists work. She has presented her research at domestic and international conferences, including the European Conference on Politics and Gender held in Amsterdam in July 2019. Forester’s work has appeared in Feminist Review and Global Environmental Politics.

While I consider myself a generalist (humani nihil a me alienum puto!) my particular interests are in ancient drama and gender studies. I regularly teach Classics courses in these areas, as well as Latin and Greek courses at all levels. I’ve been obsessed for some time now with the mutilation of the Herms in 415 BCE, and confess to being just a little bit in love with Alcibiades.

Judith Howard is the Director of the Dance Program at Carleton College and teaches various courses including Fields of Performance, The Body As Choreographer, Meaning In Motion, Reading the Dancing Body: Topics in Dance History and Cultures of Dance as well as co-directs the Semaphore Repertory Dance Company. Before coming to Carleton she taught at Macalester College and the University of Minnesota and served as a visiting artist and K-12 consultant for the Dance Education Initiative, and Arts Courses for Educators at the Perpich Center for Arts Education in Minnesota.

Judith has made dances, performed and taught in the Twin Cities for 30 years. Her work has been presented nationally and internationally and in Twin Cities venues such as the Walker Art Center, The Southern Theater, the Tek Box, and 9 x 22 Dance Lab. In 2006, she performed and taught in Yaroslavl, Russia where her work was presented by Link Vostak. Judith was selected “Twin Cities Best Choreographer” in 2005 and is the recipient of several Jerome Foundation Grants, a McKnight Choreographic Fellowship, a Sage Award for “Outstanding Performance” with April Sellers (2006), and a Sage Award for “Outstanding Dance Educator” (2014). In 2016 she was honored with a Sage Award for “Outstanding Performer.” Her professional career accomplishments include co-founding and directing the award-winning dance company, The Flying Sisters Theater. Judith’s early dance training included studying with Erik Hawkins and Twyla Tharp. Her dance training also includes Body Mind Centering, release technique, Laban Movement Analysis, Contact Improvisation, Mask (Sears Eldredge/Lecoq), Authentic Movement and Craniosacral Therapy.

Judith holds an MFA in Performance/Choreography from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

California-Los Angeles, B.A.; Sarah Lawrence, M.A.; Rutgers, Ph.D. American women’s history and women’s and gender studies. Interests include social welfare history, labor history, and historiography. Introduced a new course entitled “Gender and Work in U.S. History.” Began teaching at Carleton in 1994.

Chumie Juni (Stern College for Women B.A., Yeshiva University M.A., Brown University PhD) specializes in Jewish thought, theory of religion, and gender studies, and she has a particular interest in law. Her happy place is thinking with students about what it is like to be an embodied person and how particular religious ways of life show us things about our current, 21st century existence.

Amna Khalid specializes in modern South Asian history and has a keen interest in intellectual freedom, higher education and public scholarship.

Born in Pakistan, Khalid completed her Bachelor’s Degree at Lahore University of Management Sciences. She went on to earn an M.Phil. in Development Studies and a D.Phil. in History from the University of Oxford.

Growing up under a series of military dictatorships, Khalid has long been attuned to issues relating to censorship and free expression. She was the inaugural John Stuart Mill Faculty Fellow at Heterodox Academy and is a founding member of the Academic Freedom Alliance.

Jessica Leiman teaches and writes on British literature of the long eighteenth century, with particular focus on the novel, life-writing, gender and sexuality, and contemporary print culture. She is currently working on a book on impotence and authorship in eighteenth-century fictional and nonfictional personal histories. Degrees: Williams, B.A.; Yale, M.A., Ph.D.

Anna Moltchanova received her Ph.D. from McGill University in 2001. Her most recent research is in social ontology, which includes defending a realist approach to group agency and developing a context-sensitive concept of group intentionality that would cover a range of political environments, from oppressive to liberal. She has worked on a number of issues in global justice and her book, National Self-Determination and Justice in Multinational States, was published in 2009 by Springer. She has an interest in Modern Political Thought and has written on Locke and Rousseau. Her articles have appeared in The Journal of Political Philosophy and Journal of Social Philosophy, and a number of peer-reviewed collections of papers.

Constanza Ocampo-Raeder (BA Grinnell College, Stanford University PhD) is an assistant professor in anthropology that specializes in environmental anthropology. She is particularly interested in how people manage local resources and how these activities impact different environments. More specifically, her work aims to uncover cultural rules and behaviors that govern resource management practices as well as trace the impact of global conservation and development policies on these systems. Most of her work focuses in Latin America, where she has three ongoing fieldsites in Peru (Amazon, Coast, and an Inter-Andean River Valley). She has also worked extensively in different tropical forests and ecosystems around the world (e.g. Belize, Montana, Kenya, Tahiti).

Professor Ocampo-Raeder implements a series of qualitative and quantitative methods in her work, some of which are heavily rooted in an ecological framework. She teaches a series of courses in environmental anthropology, conservation and development, food and culture, as well as ecological anthropology.

Lori K. Pearson (St. Olaf College, B.A.; Harvard, M.T.S, Th.D.), 2003–, is a specialist in the history of Christian theology with particular interests in modern philosophy of religion (especially concepts of God and authoritative knowledge), theories of tradition, and analyses of race and racism in contemporary American theology. Her research has focused on definitions of religion, modernity, and the secular in nineteenth-century Germany. She is author of Beyond Essence: Ernst Troeltsch as Historian and Theorist of Christianity (2008) and co-editor of The Future of the Study of Religion (2004). Her current book project uses the work of Marianne Weber (wife of Max Weber) to explore the ways in which cultural and political debates about women’s rights informed early 20th-century theories of religion, social order, and secularization in fin-de-siècle Germany.

Matt Rand, a vertebrate reproductive biologist, studies the hormonal mediation and function of sexually dimorphic traits. Currently he is looking at the role of genes in determining pigment differences in Sceloporus lizards. He teaches Animal Physiology, Vertebrate Morphology, a seminar on Behavioral Genetics, part of Introductory Biology, and a non-majors course that explores the biological basis of reproduction and sexuality in Humans.

Kathleen Ryor teaches courses on Asian art history and the Introduction to Art History. Her primary area of research is Chinese painting of the late Ming dynasty. Her other research and teaching interests include interactions between different modes of representation in the Ming and Qing periods, Chinese gardens, 20th-century Chinese art and Japanese prints. Her position was sponsored by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation. She is currently a board member of the Society for Ming Studies.

Hope Sample works on 17th and 18th century European philosophy, especially Anne Conway and Immanuel Kant. The themes of this research include time, freedom, and moral responsibility. In addition, she has a collaborative project in comparative philosophy that puts Conway and neo-Confucian feminist philosopher Im Yunjidang in dialogue on issues of moral equality. Her recent work is on feminist methodology in the history of philosophy.

I was born in East Germany (when it was still the German Democratic Republic) and earned a teaching certification for Secondary Education for German and English from the Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg (Germany) in 2008. After that, I spent 18 months teaching German to students at Texas Tech University, while also getting a Master in German and a Minor in Linguistics. I enjoyed English-speaking academia and teaching college-age students and decided to get my PhD at the Pennsylvania State University in 2015 with the dissertation “The Concert Hall as Heterotopia: Sounds and Sights of Resistance in the Leipzig Gewandhaus 1970-1989.”

Prathi Seneviratne (Ph.D. Johns Hopkins University) teaches international trade, international finance, and microeconomics. Her current research explores the impact of international competition on labor markets and human capital investment. She is particularly interested in the sources of rising inequality in developing countries that liberalized trade. In her spare time, she enjoys Argentine tango, ballroom dancing, yoga, and watching old British comedies on Netflix.

Jeanne Willcoxon received her B.A. in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College, graduated from the acting program at the American Repertory Theatre Institute for Advanced Theatre Training at Harvard University, and earned her M.A. and Ph.D in theatre historiography from the University of Minnesota. Her research focuses on feminist performance and applied theatre. She has also worked professionally as an actor in New York City and regionally. Prior to coming to Carleton College, Jeanne taught and directed productions at St. Olaf College, the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, and Hamilton College.

Dr. Palmar Álvarez-Blanco is a professor at Carleton College, Minnesota. She is the co-founder and coordinator of the international association ALCESXXI, a space dedicated to critical, and public intervention in research, educational, and cultural areas threatened by capitalist interference.

As a cultural researcher, Palmar Álvarez-Blanco focuses on tracing the historical issues and crises inherent to the capitalist system, as well as on situated analysis and documentation of the transition towards a system based on the logic of the Commons. This work is captured in the cartography and living open archive of The Constellation of the Commons. 

From 1982 to 2025, Susan taught a wide range of courses including British Literature surveys, 19th c British fiction and poetry, Jane Austen, The Pre-Raphaelites and the Bloomsbury Group, Methods of Interpretation, Narrative Theory, Film Theory, Visual Studies, Mikhail Bakhtin, Creative Writing, Memoir, and Journalism (News Stories).

Stanford, B.A.; Ochanomizu University, M.A.; Harvard, Ph.D.; Japanese language and literature, especially modern fiction, with particular emphasis on Natsume Soseki, Mishima Yukio, Shimao Toshio, and fiction by contemporary Japanese women. Growing interest in English language fiction by Indian women. Began teaching at Carleton in 1983.