Gender Studies School for Cultural & Social Transformation

Maile Arvin

Associate Professor

Dr. Maile Arvin is an associate professor of History and Gender Studies at the University of Utah. She is a Native Hawaiian feminist scholar who works on issues of race, gender, science and colonialism in Hawai‘i and the broader Pacific. At the University of Utah, she is part of the leadership of the Pacific Islands Studies Initiative, which was awarded a Mellon Foundation grant to support ongoing efforts to develop Pacific Islands Studies curriculum, programming and student recruitment and support.

Arvin’s first book, Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawaiʻi and Oceania, was published with Duke University Press in 2019. In that book, she analyzes the nineteenth and early twentieth century history of social scientists declaring Polynesians “almost white.” The book argues that such scientific studies contributed to a settler colonial logic of possession through whiteness. In this logic, Indigenous Polynesians (the people) and Polynesia (the place) became the natural possessions of white settlers, since they reasoned that Europeans and Polynesians shared an ancient ancestry. The book also examines how Polynesians have long challenged this logic in ways that regenerate Indigenous ways of relating to each other. Her work has also been published in the journals Meridians, American Quarterly, Native American and Indigenous Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies, The Scholar & Feminist, and Feminist Formations, as well as on the nonprofit independent news site Truthout.

From 2015-17, Arvin was an assistant professor at the University of California, Riverside, in Ethnic Studies. She earned her PhD in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, San Diego. Her dissertation won the American Studies Association’s Ralph Henry Gabriel prize. She is also a former University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Charles Eastman Fellow in Native American Studies at Dartmouth College, and Ford Foundation Pre-doctoral Fellow.

Matthew Basso

Associate Professor

Matt Basso is an Associate Professor of History and Gender Studies at the University of Utah.  His research interests include public history and histories of the U.S. West, masculinity, labor, racial formations, war and society, and Pacific settler colonialism. He is the author or editor of four books including Meet Joe Copper: Masculinity and Race on Montana’s World War II Home Front (University of Chicago Press, 2013), winner of the Philip Taft Labor History Book Award and the American Historical Association’s Pacific Coast Branch Book Award, and a K-12 textbook entitled We Shall Remain: A Native History of Utah and America (American West Center, 2009), part of the Utah American Indian Curriculum Project for which he served as PI and which won the Western History Association’s Autry Public History Prize, the American Association of State and Local History’s Award of Merit, and National Council on Public History’s Project of the Year – Honorable Mention. His most recent articles appear in Settler Colonial Studies, Journal of the West, and Frontiers, and consider industrial settler masculinity, the Popular Front resonances in Buffalo Bill(1944), and soccer, masculinity, and neoliberalism in Mexico respectively. He is currently working on two scholarly projects: a new history of the World War II home front for the National Park Service, which includes training undergraduate and graduate students in public history methods, and a book that uses New Zealand history as a case study to consider settler masculinity through the lens of work and war.

Debjani Chakravarty

Associate Professor, Lecturer

Dr. Debjani Chakravarty is an interdisciplinary scholar with expertise in sociology, gender studies, media studies, and religious studies. Dr. Chakravarty’s research and teaching interests include globalization, nation, and labor; feminist pedagogy and epistemology; feminist and critical theory; gendered new media; issues of gender, sexuality,  religiosity, race, and class within citizenship/belonging.  Her academic and activist work is guided by antiracist and anticolonial praxis.  She has previously worked as a journalist and social worker in India; as award-winning faculty in several universities in the US, and has published academic and artistic works exploring the topic of transnational feminisms, collaborative research ethics, new media representation, sexualities, and epistemic justice. Dr. Chakravarty’s latest research can be found in the journals Sexuality and Culture, Equity and Excellence in Education, and Social & Cultural Geography. She is currently working on a project that explores the meaning and implications of gendered invisible labor.

Lynn Deboeck

Associate Professor Lecturer

Dr. Lynn Deboeck is an Associate Professor Lecturer of theatre and gender studies at the University of Utah. She earned her PhD in Theatre and a Graduate Certificate in Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies from the University of Kansas. Her research interests include reproductive women on stage, gender and representation in performance, pedagogy in higher education and feminist theatre. She is also a theatre director with a 18-year record, including mostly plays written by women.

In her directing pursuits, she most recently directed “Helen,” by Euripedes at the 50th anniversary of Salt Lake City’s Classical Greek Theatre Festival. She also had her original play “Lynchpin” (a play about the life of Ida B. Wells) performed at the 2019 Edward Lewis Festival. Her most recent scholarly publications include “Feminist Resistance to the Coded-Male Auteur-Director,” an article in Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies and “The Culinary Coding of Gender Construction: Simplicity Rhetoric in Cookbooks from the Little Blue Book Series,” an article in antae: A Journal on the Interspaces of English Studies.

Lezlie Frye

Assistant Professor

Lezlie Frye is an Assistant Professor of Gender Studies in the School for Cultural and Social Transformation. Her research concentrates on the cultural history of disability, race, and gender in the United States since the 1970s, with a particular emphasis on histories of state violence, citizenship, and social movements. Lezlie received her Ph.D. in 2016 from the American Studies Program, Department of Social at Cultural Analysis, at New York University and was the 2014-15 Predoctoral Research Fellow in the Fisher Center for Gender Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She is currently working on a manuscript entitled Domesticating Disability: Post-Civil Rights Racial Disenfranchisement and the Birth of the Disabled Citizen. Lezlie’s academic work is preceded by over a decade of popular education, activism, and organizing work that coheres around disability, racial, and economic justice.

Claudia Geist

Associate Professor

Claudia Geist (she/her) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and the Division of Gender Studies, where she serves as the interim chair in AY 23/24. She studies inequality in many forms, both in the United States and with a comparative perspective, to understand the theoretical connections between gendered institutions, social context, and behavior. Her recent work examines the gendered division of labor, contraception and pregnancy intentions, as well as theoretical and measurement approaches to gender, sexuality, and family.

Kim Hackford-Peer

Associate Professor Lecturer

Dr. Kim Hackford-Peer (she/they) is an Associate Professor (Career Line Teaching Faculty) in the Division of Gender Studies. Kim’s teaching career began in first grade when she and her best friend taught their classmates all about teeter totter safety – Gender Studies is glad she has expanded her areas of interest! Now Kim teaches classes (many of which carry general education designations) that focus on queer studies, representation, and pedagogy. Kim partners with the Salt Lake Center for Science Education where undergraduate interns mentor high school students and teach them about queer history and activism. Kim also works with undergraduate students who are interested in developing skills used to design and implement curriculum in high school and university settings. Kim was recognized with the Distinguished Teaching Award at the University of Utah for 2020-21 and was a recipient of the national LGBTQ Point Foundation Flagship Scholarship from 2007-2010. Kim’s research interests coincide with their teaching practices; they are deeply interested in pedagogy, particularly as it relates to the ways that identity and education intersect.

Wanda Pillow

Professor

Wanda S. Pillow is Professor in Gender Studies at the U where she offers courses in qualitative research methods; gender, race and sexuality studies; race, feminism and poststructural and theories; and educational policy. Her work focuses on intersectional analyses of the relationship between subjectivity and representation (historically, legally, discursively and textually) and on tracing what this means and looks like methodologically and theoretically across cultural productions, policy, and embodied praxis. Resulting projects include tracing colonial relations of gender, race and sexuality through Sacajawea and York of the 1804-1806 Corps of Discovery expedition; methodological essays; and on-going participation in research and efforts for the educational rights of young mothers. Professor Pillow is committed to mentoring students and emerging scholars and participates in several national professional organizations. She is also a Co-Editor of Frontiers–A Journal of Women Studies.

Sarah Projansky

Professor

Sarah Projansky is Associate Vice President for Faculty on main campus. She holds a joint-appointment as Professor of Film & Media Arts and of Gender Studies, and is an Adjunct Professor of Communication. Sarah has published two books, Spectacular Girls: Media Fascination and Celebrity Culture and Watching Rape: Film and Television in Postfeminist Culture, and she is co-editor of Enterprise Zones: Critical Positions on Star Trek. As well, she has published articles on feminist and Asian American independent cinema, news media and Title IX, and feminist media studies.

Sarah’s courses include Film Theory, Introduction to TV, Gender and Contemporary Issues, Girl Films, Film and Television Stars, and Feminist Girls’ Media Studies. She has been a member of numerous dissertation committees and MFA committees, and she has directed many undergraduate honors theses.

Angela Marie Smith

Associate Professor

Angela Marie Smith is Associate Professor of English and Gender Studies, director of Disability Studies, and co-chair of the Universal Design and Access Committee at the University of Utah. Her research examines disability representation and affects in cinema, television, and online media. She is the author of Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror Cinema (Columbia University Press, 2012). She has also published in journals Literature and Medicine, Post Script, and Antipodes and in edited collections The Matter of Disability (2019), Monsters: A Companion (2020), Embodying Contagion (2021), The Routledge Companion to Gender and Affect (2022), and The Evolution of Horror in the 21st Century (2023).

Kilo Zamora

Instructor

Kilo Zamora is known for his skills to increase peoples capacity for social change. With this ability, Zamora leads his classes with a focus on implementing their scholarship outside the classroom by applying community-engaged research and critical theories to decrease inequity gaps. Off-campus, Zamora is a national equity/inclusion consultant for cities, nonprofits, and education systems and has served with mayoral transition teams, the Salt Lake City Human Rights Commission, and The Inclusion Center for Community and Justice. For his work off and on campus, Zamora has received multiple awards including the University of Utah’s faculty recognition award, School of Social Work’s Teacher of the Year, Pete Suazo Social Justice Award, Equality Utah Award, Utah Education Association Award, Utah Martin Luther King Award, Southern Utah University Humanitarian Award, and University of Utah’s Outstanding Young Alumni Award.