Diane Harriford, Vassar College

Diane Harriford is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of Women’s Studies at Vassar College. For the last twenty years, she has been teaching sociology, Women’s Studies, and African American Studies while engaging in various social movements. In the 1970s, she was an assistant to Bella Abzug, a member of the US House of Representatives from New York. Diane also worked closely with the Coalition of Labor Union Women. Currently, Diane is involved in the National Women’s Studies Association and the Black Radical Congress. Diane has spoken widely on women and slavery in the 19th century, on Black women and sexuality, and Black women in the academy. Most recently she has spoken in Brazil on the rise of Black conservatives in the United States and on Hurricane Katrina in Tunisia.

Her forthcoming book When the Center Is on Fire: Passionate Social Theory for Our Times,( University of Texas Press) coauthored with Becky Thompson uses classical social thinkers--W. E. B. Du Bois, Max Weber, Karl Marx, and emile Durkheim--to understand a series of twenty-first century social traumas, including the massacre at Columbine High School, the 9/11 attacks, the torture at Abu Ghraib prison, and Hurricane Katrina. The authors assert that classical social theorists grappled with the human condition in ways that remain profoundly relevant. They show, for example, that the loss of double consciousness that Du Bois identified in African Americans enabled political elites to turn a blind eye to the poverty and vulnerability of many of New Orleans’s citizens.

The authors’ compelling, sometimes irreverent, often searing interpretations make this book essential reading for students, activists, generations X, Y, and Z, and everybody bored by the 6 o’clock news.

Yi-Chun Tricia Lin, Southern Connecticut State University

Yi-Chun Tricia Lin is Professor/Director of Women’s Studies at Southern Connecticut State University.

A fifteenth-generation daughter of Taiwan, Yi-Chun Tricia Lin traveled oceans and continent, from her native island, to pursue a doctoral degree in continental philosophy and literary theory. In the process, she found ethnic studies and women’s studies.
Her dissertation, “Translating Cultures as Re-Writing Boundaries” (1997), is a study of selected Asian American women’s cultural and literary productions. Since, her research and teaching interests have gone intensely into ethnic studies, women’s studies and post-colonial studies. Among her most recent projects is a comparative cultural studies of women’s writing from the Caribbean and Pacific islands.

Before joining the Women’s Studies faculty in August 2004, Tricia Lin taught writing & literature and Asian American literature full-time, from 1994-2004, at City University of New York/Borough of Manhattan Community College.

Mary Margaret Fonow, Arizona State University

Mary Margaret Fonow, Professor and Director, Women and Gender Studies, joined the ASU faculty in 2004. She provides national leadership for the research training of doctoral students in the filed of women and gender studies.

Her research interests include feminist methodology, transnational labor rights, and social movements. She is the author of Union Women: Forging Feminism In The United Steelworkers Union. Fonow has conducted comparative research on workplace change in U.S., Canada and Australia and has recently concluded a study of women’s transnational labor activism in male dominated unions in the metal trades.

Her new work focuses on the reformulation of labor rights and women’s rights as human rights and on the intersections between movements for sexuality rights and economic justice.

She has served on the editorial boards of Gender & Society, NWSA Journal, Frontiers, and the Australian Journal of Sociology. Fonow is a member of the UNESCO Women and Gender Research Network and serves on the Governor’s Commission on the Prevention of Violence against Women for the state of Arizona.

Sheila Hassell Hughes, University of Dayton

Sheila Hassell Hughes is Associate Professor, Department of English, at the University of Dayton, and is the director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program. She holds an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Women’s Studies from Emory University. After a post-graduate year as visiting faculty at Emory, she joined UD’s English Department in 1998. In 2004 she began directing the Women’s Studies Program and helped establish a new major.

Dr. Hughes is active in the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA), and she has served since 1999 as Associate Editor for North America for Literature and Theology, a scholarly journal published by Oxford University Press. She is also a member of the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures (ASAIL) and the Modern Languages Association (MLA).

Her research Interests include: the intersections of gender, ethnicity, and religion in American Indian women’s writng; Louise Erdrich; religion and literature; feminist theory; and women and religion. She is currently co-writing a book about the representation of religion in Louise Erdrich’s work.