Boards
The Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights has been located at the University of Massachusetts Boston since 2009, when the Center for Gender, Security and Human Rights was created as the Consortium's UMass institutional home. We are privileged to have the benefit of working with two advisory boards, the original Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights Advisory Board and a UMass Boston Center for Gender, Security and Human Rights Advisory Board.
Aaron Belkin
Professor of Political Science, San Francisco State University
Aaron Belkin is a Professor of Political Science at San Francisco State University, founder and director of the Palm Center, and author of Bring Me Men: Military Masculinity and the Benign Facade of American Empire, 1898-2001 and How We Won, Progressive Lessons From the Repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (e-book). He has been one of the nation’s leading advocates on the gays-in-the-military issue for more than a decade, and is now running a research and public education campaign on transgender military service.
Amani El-Jack
Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston
Dr. El Jack's research, teaching and policy engagement traverse socio-economic, political and cultural interrogation of the gendered fields of globalization; forced migration; militarized femininities and masculinities and post-conflict reconstruction processes. Some of her recent publications include a book manuscript, under contract by Ashgate entitled, Militarized Commerce: Gender Dimensions of Transnational Migration in South Sudan; “Protracted Refugees: Why Gender Matters?” (2012). In Transatlantic Cooperation on Protracted Displacement: Urgent Needs and Unique Opportunity. J. Calabrese and J. Marret. (ed.) Middle East Institute: Washington DC, pp. 335-344; and “Education is My Mother and Father” (2011). Refuge Journal, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 19-29.
Cynthia Enloe
Research Professor of International Development, Community, and Environment at Clark University
Cynthia Enloe has chaired both Political Science and Women’s Studies at Clark University. Her feminist teaching and research have focused on the interplay of women’s politics in the local, national and international arenas, with special attention to women in globalized factories (especially sneaker factories) and to diverse women’s experiences of, ideas about and actions in wars and militarized cultures. She has had Fulbrights in Malaysia and Guyana, and guest professorships in Japan, Britain and Canada, as well as lecturing in Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Germany, Korea, Turkey and at universities around the U.S., and is the winner of numerous professional awards. Her works have been translated into Spanish, Turkish, Japanese, Korean, Swedish, and German. She has written for Ms. Magazine and appeared on National Public Radio, Al Jazeera, and the BBC.
Enloe’s fourteen books include Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (2004), The Curious Feminist (2004), Globalization and Militarism (2007), and Nimo’s War, Emma’s War: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War (2010). She co-authored with Joni Seager, The Real State of America: Mapping the Myths and Truths about the United States (2011). Her newest book is Seriously! Investigating Crashes and Crises as if Women Mattered (2013). Her new, thoroughly up-dated edition of Bananas, Beaches and Bases is available July, 2014.
Dyan Mazurana
Associate Research Professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University and Research Director of Gender, Youth and Community at the Feinstein International Center
Dyan Mazurana is also the Cathy Cohen Lasry Visiting Professor of Comparative Genocide Studies at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Clark University. Mazurana’s areas of specialty include women, children and armed conflict, documenting serious crimes committed during conflict, and accountability, remedy and reparation. Her books include Research Methods in Conflict Settings: A View From Below (Cambridge University Press, 2013) with Karen Jacobsen and Lacey Gale, After the Taliban: Life and Security in Rural Afghanistan (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008) with Neamatollah Nojumi and Elizabeth Stites; Gender, Conflict, and Peacekeeping (Rowman & Littlefield 2005) with Angela Raven-Roberts and Jane Parpart; and Where are the Girls? Girls in Fighting Forces in Northern Uganda, Sierra Leone, and Mozambique (Rights & Democracy, 2004) with Susan McKay.
Mazurana works with a variety of governments, UN agencies, human rights and child protection organizations regarding improving efforts to assist youth and women affected by armed conflict, including those associated with fighting forces. She has written training materials regarding gender, human rights, armed conflict, and post-conflict periods for civilian, police, and military peacekeepers involved in UN and NATO operations, and contributed to materials now widely used to assist in documenting serious violations and abuses against women and girls during conflict and post-conflict reconstruction periods. Her current research focuses on efforts of war affected communities to heal (physically, mentally, spiritually), rebuild individual and societal relations, and restore moral boundaries in the midst or aftermath of extreme violence. Within this work, she has a strong focus on documenting serious crimes suffered and the necessary remedy and reparation for survivors that support recovery and healing.
J. Ann Tickner
Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the School of International Service at the American University
J. Ann Tickner is a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the School of International Service at the American University and Professor Emerita at the University of Southern California. sidence at the American University. Her principle areas of research include international theory, peace and security, and feminist approaches to international relations. Her books include Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving International Security (1992), Gendering World Politics: Issues and Approaches in the Post-Cold War World (2001), Feminist International Relations: Conversations about the Past, Present and Future, ed. with Laura Sjoberg (2011) and A Feminist Voyage through International Relations (2013). She served as President of the International Studies Association from 2006-2007.
Katharine H.S. Moon
Edith Stix Wasserman Professor of Asian Studies; Professor of Political Science at Wellesley College
Katharine H.S. Moon is Professor of Political Science and the Wasserman Chair in Asian Studies at Wellesley College. She is a graduate of Smith College and Princeton University. She authored Protesting America: Democracy and the U.S.-Korea Alliance and Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.-Korea Relations and other publications on the U.S. military in Asia, U.S.-East Asia foreign policy, women and gender in international relations, as well as democratization and social movements in Asia. Moon was named one of the top Asia scholars in the U.S. She served in the Department of State and consults for think tanks, NGOs, and the media.
Amani El-Jack
Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston
Dr. El Jack's research, teaching and policy engagement traverse socio-economic, political and cultural interrogation of the gendered fields of globalization; forced migration; militarized femininities and masculinities and post-conflict reconstruction processes. Some of her recent publications include a book manuscript, under contract by Ashgate entitled, Militarized Commerce: Gender Dimensions of Transnational Migration in South Sudan; “Protracted Refugees: Why Gender Matters?” (2012). In Transatlantic Cooperation on Protracted Displacement: Urgent Needs and Unique Opportunity. J. Calabrese and J. Marret. (ed.) Middle East Institute: Washington DC, pp. 335-344; and “Education is My Mother and Father” (2011). Refuge Journal, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 19-29.
Anita Miller
Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at the University of Massachusetts Boston
Christa Kelleher
Research Director, Center for Women in Politics & Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts Boston
Christa Kelleher has been affiliated with the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy since 2002 and currently oversees research on women’s political leadership and a range of public policy issues that affect women, with a particular focus on women’s reproductive and maternal health.
She has previously taught courses in sociology, community health, public affairs, and public policy at Pine Manor College, Brandeis University, and Tufts University.
Kelleher’s federally funded doctoral study examined the complex issues facing Boston and Toronto-based mothers during the early postpartum period to inform public policies related to this important women’s health issue.
Her background includes work on political campaigns, in the Massachusetts Legislature, and in not-for-profit advocacy organizations.
David W. Cash
Dean of the McCormack Graduate School at the University of Massachusetts Boston
Elora Halim Chowdhury
Associate Professor and Chair of Women's and Gender Studies Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston
Elora Halim Chowdhury is an Associate Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She received her PhD in Women’s Studies from Clark University, Massachusetts (2004). Her teaching and research interests include transnational feminisms, gender and development, violence and human rights advocacy in South Asia. She is the author of Transnationalism Reversed: Women Organizing Against Gendered Violence in Bangladesh (SUNY Press, 2011), which was awarded the National Women’s Studies Association Gloria Anzaldua book prize in 2012. Elora has published academic essays, fiction and creative non-fiction in journals and anthologies on topics as varied as violence, women’s organizing in the Global South, transnational feminist praxis, nationalism, culture and migration, and Islam and gender politics in South Asia. Currently she is working on two book projects: a collection of essays on dissident cross-cultural friendships/alliances, and a monograph on narratives of violence, trauma and healing in contemporary films and fiction about the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971. Prior to joining UMass, she worked for BRAC, a development NGO, Naripokkho, a women’s advocacy organization, The Daily Star, a national newspaper, the Rights Program in UNICEF, and the Higher Education Program at the Ford Foundation.
Heidi Gengenbach
Assistant Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Boston
Heidi Gengenbach joined the History Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston in 2013 after over a decade of research, teaching and consulting in the field of African agricultural, livelihood and gender history. Her doctoral dissertation, an interdisciplinary study of rural women’s oral and artefactual forms of history-telling in post-civil war Mozambique, received the Gutenberg-e Electronic Book Prize from the American Historical Association, and was published as an e-book by Columbia University Press in 2005. She has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in African History at SUNY-Buffalo, Harvard, Brown, and the University of Minnesota; She also taught Africa-themed seminars in the writing program at Boston University for two years. Her consulting work arises from a commitment to approaching African history both as an academic endeavor and as an important source of applied knowledge for Africa’s present development challenges and policy concerns. Most recently, she served as Academic Partner for a Gates Foundation-funded project with the Global Fund for Women, supporting the agricultural and food security programming of grassroots women’s groups in Burkina Faso, Kenya and Uganda. In other chapters of her career, she has worked for local non-profits focused on organic farming, hunger relief, youth mentoring, and legal advocacy for abused and neglected children. Her current book project, on the gendered meanings of the cassava “revolution” in Mozambique, represents the first phase of a long-term research and community-engagement initiative on local histories of food system interventions in post-conflict settings in central Mozambique, northern Uganda, and northern Ethiopia.
Jean Humez
Professor Emerita, Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston
Professor Jean Humez taught in the UMB Women’s Studies Program from 1975 through her retirement in 2008, chairing the Department from 1998 through 2008. Her research and writing has been largely concerned with the social, political and cultural history of U.S. women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a particular emphasis on how women with little or no access to literacy in the past, including notable African Americans, nevertheless were able to make significant marks on this history, often through religious experience, testimonial and leadership. She has published many articles on these questions, as well as three books: Gifts of Power: The Writings of Rebecca Jackson, Black Visionary, Shaker Eldress (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981); Mother’s First-Born Daughters: Early Shaker Writings on Women and Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); and Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). She is currently at work on a project concerning Pauli Murray’s later (post-memoir) years, as documented in the Pauli Murray correspondence in the Schlesinger Library. With co-author Gail Dines of Wheelock College, she has also produced Gender, Race and Class in Media (Sage Publications, fourth edition 2014), a text reader aimed at helping students learn how to analyze mass media representations.
Rajini Srikanth
Professor of English, College of Liberal Arts; Dean, Honors College at the University of Massachusetts Boston
Rajini Srikanth is Professor of English and Dean of the Honors College at UMass Boston. She is the author of the award-winning book The World Next Door: South Asian American Literature and the Idea of America (2004) and Constructing the Enemy: Empathy/Antipathy in U.S. Literature and Law (2012). Her publications have appeared in such journals as Pedagogy, The Comparatist, International Journal of Feminist Studies, and the Journal of Asian American Studies. Her research and teaching interests are in human rights and literature, American literature (including Asian American literature), diaspora studies, and comparative race and ethnic studies.
Sindiso Mnisi Weeks
Assistant Professor of Public Policy of Excluded Populations in the School for Global Inclusion and Social Development at the University of Massachusetts Boston
Sindiso Mnisi Weeks has served as a senior researcher in the Centre for Law and Society at the University of Cape Town (UCT). In her role at UCT, she worked on the Rural Women's Action-Research program. This program combines research, advocacy, and policy work on women, property, and governing authority under customary law. She also taught African Customary Law as a senior lecturer in UCT's Department of Private Law. In 2013-2014, she was a resident scholar at the University of New Hampshire School of Law, where she held a fellowship for the completion of a book.
Mnisi Weeks has published in academic and popular media on customary law, women’s rights, cultural rights, governance, participatory democracy, dispute management, and the South African constitution. As a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford, she researched the tensions between living customary law(s) and South African state law. Prior to Oxford, she clerked for the Deputy Chief Justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, Dikgang Moseneke. Her current work focuses on the pursuit of justice and human security in indigenous courts by poor women and men living in rural South Africa.
As a young researcher, Mnisi Weeks is highly rated by the National Research Foundation of South Africa. She has been the recipient of a number of awards, including the Women in Science Award for the Development of Rural Women through Science and Technology.
Thomas T Kane
Director, William Joiner Institute for the Study of War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts Boston
Thomas Kane was appointed the Director of the William Joiner Institute in June 2013. Dr. Kane enlisted in the U.S. Army in July 1969 and served for six years of active duty in the United States during the Vietnam War. He received his BA degree from George Washington University, a MA degree in Demography from Georgetown University, and a MA (1982) and PhD (1984) in Sociology from Princeton University. He has been awarded fellowships and/or grants from NIH, Princeton University, the DAAD, the East-West Center, USAID, and the Rockefeller, Ford and Mellon Foundations. Dr. Kane has worked in the field of international public health for over 30 years, working in more than 30 countries. From 1991-1996 Dr. Kane was a tenure-track faculty member of the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health, teaching program evaluation and operations research methods, and conducting research and evaluations of public health programs in developing countries in Africa and Asia. He continued to serve as an adjunct faculty member at JHU for an additional 10 years while living and working overseas. Dr. Kane’s international health work has included six years residence in Vietnam as Country Director for Family Health International and a consultant for United Nations agencies, USAID’s War Victims Fund (WVF) and the Displaced Children and Orphans Fund (DCOF), and for several international NGOs. Dr. Kane also worked as a Senior Operations Research Scientist at the ICDDRB Center for Population and Health in Dhaka Bangladesh (3 years); as a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at the Sahel Institute in Bamako Mali (2 years) and for a year in Nigeria while on the faculty of Johns Hopkins University. He is currently conducting research on American veterans and is also working with the government of Vietnam, USAID, the Hanoi School of Public Health, and international and Vietnamese NGOs in Vietnam to study the impact of war and other causes on disability in the Vietnamese population in areas heavily affected by Agent Orange dioxin exposure from the Vietnam-American war. Dr. Kane has authored/ co-authored several books and published numerous peer-reviewed journal articles on a range of public health, social, and development issues. He lives with his wife and two daughters in North Marshfield, MA.
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