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Sarah Leonard

Director of the Graduate Program in Gender/Cultural Studies, Assistant Professor of History
B.A., University of California, Santa Cruz
M.A., Ph.D., Brown University
sarah.leonard@simmons.edu

Sarah Leonard is Assistant Professor of History and director of the graduate program in Gender/Cultural Studies. Trained as a cultural historian and as a historian of gender and modern Germany, she is interested in the advantages and challenges of fusing theory and empirical research. Her essay, "Pornography, Obscenity, and the Historian," published in The Modern History of Sexuality (Palgrave, 2005) explores the process through which historians came to see sexuality and obscenity as topics worthy of serious study. She is finishing a book-length project on the history of obscenity in modern Germany entitled "Fragile Minds, Vulnerable Souls: Print Culture, Modernity, and the Invention of Obscenity Law in the German States, 1815-1890." During the academic year 2002-2003, she pursued research on this project funded by a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania's Humanities Forum. Leonard teaches courses on modern European history, cultural and intellectual history, cultural theory, and German history.

Renee Bergland

Associate Professor of English
B.A., St. John’s College
Ph.D., Columbia University
renee.bergland@simmons.edu

Renee Bergland’s diverse literary background enables her to teach a wide range of cultural and critical American Literature, Native American Literature, Culture Studies, Visual Culture, Gender Studies, Critical Theory.

Carole Biewener

Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and Economics
B.A., Douglass College
Ph.D., University of Massachusetts, Amherst
carole.biewener@simmons.edu

Carole Biewener teaches courses in economic development, gender in development, women and work, and feminist economics. She is particularly interested in issues relating to economic difference. Building on her previous work on the French Socialist government's monetary and financial policies in the 1980s, her current work is focused on banks' progressive community development initiatives. She is consulting on a two-year economic development in western Massachusetts, "Rethinking Economies: Envisioning Alternative Regional Futures," funded by the National Science Foundation. She also maintains a lively interest in theoretical issues related to poststructuralist feminism, postmodernism, and Marxism and has published in this field. She is coeditor of the book, Marxism and Postmodern Age: Confronting the New World Order (Guilford 1995), along with Antonio Callari and Stephen Cullenberg.

Pamela Bromberg

Professor of English and Women’s Studies, Director of Graduate Program in English
B.A., Wellesley College
Ph.D., Yale University
pamela.bromberg@simmons.edu

Pamela Bromberg currently teaches the following courses: 18th century literature, Romanticism, Contemporary English Fiction, Women in Literature.

Kelly Hager

Associate Professor of English
B.A., Rice University
M.A., Ph.D., University of California, Irvine
kelly.hager@simmons.edu

Kelly Hager is Assistant Professor of English. She specializes in Victorian literature, children’s literature, and television studies and has published essays on David Copperfield and The Old Curiosity Shop. She is currently working on a project that examines how reading practices for young girls are dictated in children’s literature and the effect of that disciplinary move on canon formation. A portion of this project, “Betsy and the Canon,” is included in The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader (Rutgers 2003). Professor Hager is also a contributor to the forthcoming Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, a co-author of the Instructor’s Guide for the Norton Introduction to Literature, and a judge for The Lion and the Unicorn Poetry Award (an annual award for the best book of children’s poetry published in North America).

Professor Hager teaches Victorian Literature and Culture, The English Novel from Victorians to Moderns, Victorian Children’s Literature, Women in Lit, and Critical Interpretations. She also teaches the introductory seminar in the Gender/Cultural Studies program and a graduate course in narrative theory and television. She has directed an honors thesis on Charlotte Mary Yonge’s bestselling Victorian novel The Daisy Chain and capstone projects in Gender/Cultural Studies on the queerness of L.M.M. Montgomery’s Emily books, on the portrayal of the “normal” gay on prime-time-television, and on the representation of on-line, computer-mediated selves in blogs, email, and bots.

Diane E. Hammer

Administrative Director, Simmons Institute for Leadership and Change
B.A., State University of New York, Binghamton
M.S., Simmons College
diane.hammer@simmons.edu

Laura Prieto

Associate Professor of History and Women’s studies, Co-Director of Dual-Degree Graduate Program in Archives Management
B.A., Wellesley College
M.A., Ph.D., Brown University
laura.prieto@simmons.edu

Laura Prieto teaches courses in U.S. history, including Women and Gender, Race, and American Cultures. Her book, At Home in the Studio: The Professionalization of Women Artists in America (Harvard University Press, 2001) studies how women painters, sculptors, and illustrators created a professional identity for themselves in the face of exclusion. Other publications include contributions to Women and the Arts , the Louisa May Alcott Encyclopedia , and the Journal of the Early Republic.

Her ongoing research centers on American womanhood and imperialism during the era of the Spanish-American War.

Jyoti Puri

Associate Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies
B.A., Bombay University
Ph.D., Northeastern University
jyoti.puri@simmons.edu
Jyoti Puri teaches courses that focus on issues of gender, sexuality, postcoloniality, development, and culture in an international context. Her research interests are closely related. She is particularly interested in the ways that the constructions of gender and sexuality are being shaped within a transnational context.

Her book, Women, Body, Desire in Postcolonial India: Narratives of Gender and Sexuality , was published by Routledge in June 1999. Her new projects include research on the emergence of sexual identities within India and a book on issues of colonialism and nationalism.

Diane Raymond

Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences
B.A., Vassar College
M.A., Ph.D., New York University

Jill Taylor

Associate Professor of Education and Women’s Studies, Chair of Women’s Studies
B.A., New Zealand School of Physiotherapy
B.A., University of Massachusetts, Boston
Ed.M., Ed.D., Harvard University
jill.taylor@simmons.edu

Jill Taylor teaches in the Department of Education and Human Services; in the Multicultural First Year course: Culture Matters; and in Women’s Studies. She completed her doctoral program working with Carol Gilligan and the Harvard Project on Women’s Psychology and Girl’s Development. Her doctoral research was with a small group of adolescent mothers who were in an adolescent parenting program. Further research has been with girls and boys considered to be at risk for early parenthood and/or school dropout. With Carol Gilligan and Amy Sullivan, Taylor co-authored Between Voice and Silence: Women and Girls, Race and Relationship , and with Carol Gilligan and Janie Ward, Mapping the Moral Domain: The Contribution of Women’s Thinking of Psychological Theory and Education . She works with adolescents at the Mary Curley School in Boston and with Student Support Services.

Mary Jane Treacy

Professor of Education and Women’s Studies , Director of the Honors Program, and Director of the Multidisciplinary Core Course, Culture Matters
B.A., Emmanuel College
M.A., Ph.D., Boston University
maryjane.treacy@simmons.edu

Mary Jane Treacy teaches cultural theory in the Gender/Cultural Studies program and is the director and instructor for the first year course for undergraduates, Culture Matters. Her research is on Latin American women's narrative and testimonial autobiography of the last twenty years, focusing especially on women's writing in response to revolutionary struggles and state violence in the Southern Cone and Central America. She has most recently published on the works of Claribel Alegria and issues of multiculturalism in the classroom.

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Meet the Faculty

Associate Professor Renee Bergland, author of The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects, completed a year as Fulbright Senior Scholar in American Studies at the University of Bergen in Norway.

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