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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 is a Professor of Economics and Women's Studies at Simmons College She teaches courses in economic development, gender in development, women and work, feminist economics, and social justice. Currently she is coordinator of the interdisciplinary Social Justice minor. She is particularly interested in issues relating to economic difference. Building on previous work on the French Socialist government's financial policies in the 1980s, her recent work has focused on community development and social economy projects in the United States and Canada. She is also writing a co-authored book that traces the use of the term empowerment in the community development and gender and development traditions, and is working on an edited book project that compares different college programs which combine a social justice curriculum with community-based learning.

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 Associate Professor of English and Women's & Gender Studies and was director of the graduate program in Gender/Cultural Studies from 2003-2007. She specializes in Victorian literature, children's literature, and television studies and has published essays on Dickens, children's literature and canon formation, and the Bront‘s and adolescence. She is currently working on a project that considers how the novel constructs ideas of physical, intellectual and psychosexual health, combining an argument about the somatic effects of reading with an analysis of the value of participatory reading for adolescent girls and the several ways in which children's literature participates in canon formation. This project is concerned with the ways in which novel-reading is represented in nineteenth-century culture; it brings together the fields of Victorian literature and children's literature with the history of reading practices; and it studies the novel's power to shape readers as intellectuals, healthy bodies, and (albeit in a normative fashion) sexually well-adjusted subjects. 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 Oxford Encyclopedia of Children's Literature, a co-author of the Instructor's Guide for the Norton Introduction to Literature, and was a judge for the inaugural Lion and the Unicorn Poetry Award (an annual award for the best book of children's poetry published in North America). She is the MLA Division on Children's Literature Representative to the MLA Delegate Assembly, and she sits on the Executive Committee of the MLA Division on Children's Literature.

Professor Hager teaches Victorian Literature and Culture, The English Novel from Victorians to Moderns, Victorian Children's Literature, 19th-Century American Children's Literature, Women in Literature, and Critical Interpretations. She also teaches a graduate course in narrative theory and television. She received the Dean's Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2006.

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, Director of Graduate Program in History
B.A., Wellesley College
M.A., Ph.D., Brown University
laura.prieto@simmons.edu

Laura Prieto teaches courses in American cultural history, women and gender, race formation, sexuality, and historical methodology. She recently published a project on American feminist abolitionists online in Women and Social Movements in the United States. Her study of women missionaries to the Philippines will appear in the forthcoming anthology, Competing Kingdoms: Women, Mission, Nation, and American Empire (Duke University Press). 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. Her ongoing research centers on American womanhood and imperialism during the era of the Spanish-American War. She is also writing a book surveying Women in America: Issues and Controversies for Facts on File. Laura currently directs the graduate program in History at Simmons, and she serves as president of the New England Historical Association.

Jyoti Puri

Professor of Sociology
B.A., Bombay University
Ph.D., Northeastern University
jyoti.puri@simmons.edu

Jyoti Puri is Professor in the Department of Sociology and has served as Director of the Gender/Cultural Studies Program from 2007-2008 and from 2000-2002. She has published two books, Women, Body, Desire in Postcolonial India: Narratives of Gender and Sexuality (Routledge, 1999) and Encountering Nationalism (Blackwell Publishers, 2004). She has also co-edited a special issue of the journal Gender & Society on gender, sexuality, state, and nation from a transnational feminist perspective along with publishing numerous articles and book chapters.

She is currently working on a book project, Sexualizing the State, which considers the conjunctions of sexuality and state from the angle of decriminalizing homosexuality in India. She is also collaborating on a book project which explores thematics of belonging and space through the concept of hometown. Her research interests span sexuality, gender, governmentality, biopolitics, popular texts, nation, especially in relation to India. Working at the intersections of sociology, sexuality and queer studies, feminist studies, and governmentality studies, she combines transnational feminist, queer, postcolonial, and foucauldian approaches in her work.

Her teaching interests are closely related. She teaches courses that focus on body, gender, sexuality, postcoloniality, queer and transnational issues.

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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