Emillion Adekoya is a Ph.D. candidate in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department at Stony Brook University. She exemplifies the values honored by the Vivien Hartog Graduate Student Teaching Award, which commemorates Vivien Hartog—a WGSS graduate certificate student who passed away before completing her Ph.D. in Sociology. This award recognizes a graduate student who demonstrates a deep and ongoing commitment to social justice, activism, teaching, and learning.

Emillion has taught several courses within the department and brings a strong interdisciplinary approach to her work. Her dissertation focuses on the experiences of African LGBTQ+ asylum seekers in the United States, exploring themes of displacement, identity, and resistance. Her broader research interests include Black feminism, queer politics, gender and sexuality studies, critical race theory, African studies, refugee and asylum aesthetics, and the migration and mobility of African LGBTQ+ communities.

Emillion states:

“I am a feminist social scientist and educator who is deeply committed to social justice. I view teaching as both an intellectual and activist pursuit, and my interdisciplinary work and pedagogy are grounded in addressing the intersection and hierarchization of race, class, sexuality, gender, and nationality within global systems of capital, power, and migration, and this fuels my teaching goal of ensuring that students are empowered to understand and challenge global inequalities and systems of oppression both within and beyond the classroom. I strongly believe that teaching should be about the intentional creation of a nurturing and intellectually stimulating environment, where students know that they are seen, heard, and challenged to utilize their critical thinking and analytic skills beyond the classroom. “

WGSS PhD candidate Hafza Girdap was recognized at the 2025 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Visionary Awards Gala. In celebration of Women’s History Month, the New York State Senate and Nassau County named Hafza a “Woman of Destiny” for her work with Advocates of Silenced Turkey.

The 2025 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Visionary Awards Gala took place on March 9th. Organized around the theme “Women of Destiny,” this event honored women living in New York who have dedicated themselves to advancing fairness and justice in their communities.

Hafza Girdap – a WGSS PhD candidate and Hartog Teaching Award winner – received special recognition for her activist work with Advocates for Silenced Turkey, an organization dedicated to utilizing all human rights advocacy tools to protect those whose voices are being silenced in Turkey and beyond. As the Executive Director and spokesperson, she is regularly visiting the United Nations, international venues, and community education forums to discuss the current political situation and advocate for women’s rights in Turkey. In 2024, Hafza received the Early Career Research Knowledge Exchange Award from the International Association for Political Science Students as well as the PhD Works Award for Career Exploration Award from the Graduate School at Stony Brook University.

This spring, in addition to being honored at the Dr. King Visionary Awards Gala, the New York State Senate issued an official proclamation recognizing Hafza’s unparalleled leadership and service in improving lives and transforming communities.

I am truly honored to receive the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Visionary Award and be recognized by the @NYSenate and @NassauExec.

As an immigrant Muslim woman engaged in academia at @stonybrooku, @nwsa & advocacy with @silencedturkey, @sethemfreetr, I firmly believe in the power… https://t.co/djAukHBLtG pic.twitter.com/0Qelk1T1No

— Hafza Girdap – Let Your Dreams Lead You! (@HafzaGrdp) March 10, 2025

This year, WGSS undergrad researchers have received recognition for their excellent work here at Stony Brook and beyond. Laci Burton (Class of ’25) was named URECA Research of the month this semester, and Angeline Castillo (Class of ’24) published an article based on her WGSS Senior Research Project this past winter. 

Laci Burton is a University Scholar majoring in English with minors in Writing & Rhetoric and Women’s & Gender Studies. In March 2025, she was selected as Researcher of the Month by Stony Brook’s URECA (Undergrad Research & Creative Activities) Office. Laci is a participant in the English Department’s Honors Program and completed a senior thesis about how Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House draws on the psychoanalytic theory of Dr. Nandor Fodor. This semester, in addition to completing a Writing & Rhetoric capstone project, she is also completing a WGSS Senior Research Project about what Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir and fiction tell us about archival erasures, public health crises, and the rise of authoritarianism.  To learn more about Laci and her research, check out the amazing interview she did with the URECA team!

Angeline Castillo graduated in May 2024 with a near-perfect GPA and earned a B.S. in Chemistry with a minor in Women’s & Gender Studies. During her time on campus, she served as the president of our WISE (Women in Science and Engineering) Honors Program‘s Student Leadership Council. When she enrolled in the WGSS Senior Research Seminar, she was interested in doing a project very different from the research she was doing for her major, and she was interested in sharing this new work with a wider audience. As an Asian American woman, she wanted to examine media representations of Asians and Asian Americans and intergenerational trauma in Asian and Asian American families.

After the seminar ended, Angeline began revising her final paper and reaching out to undergraduate research journals about the possibility of publishing her work. We’re happy to report all her hard work paid off! Her essay “Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) and Turning Red (2022): Exploring the Mother-Daughter Relationship as a Conduit for Asian Generational Trauma” was published in the Fall 2024 issue of Queen City Writers (a refereed journal that publishes undergrad essays and multimedia work).

WGSS PhD candidate Emillion Adekoya was selected – not once, but twice! – to serve as a Summer Research Fellow with the Human Sexuality Studies program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. During Summers 2023 and 2024, Emillion joined a team of researchers at the Sexuality Research Data Lab to systematically study sex work commentary on social media platforms.

The Human Sexuality Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies hosts an annual Sexuality Research Fellowship each summer. At the Sexuality Research Data Lab, fellows work collaboratively to generate research in one of the following areas: Sexuality and Housing; Family and Sexuality; Disability and Sexuality; and Sex Work. While fellows are sometimes tasked with the work of collecting and coding qualitative data and generating comprehensive data sets, they also have the opportunity to work with the existing databanks to develop new projects and collaboratively write papers.

Emillion Adekoya is a WGSS PhD candidate writing dissertation about African LGTBQ+ asylum seekers in the United States. She was selected to serve as a fellow at the Sexuality Research Data Lab in Summer 2023 and, again, in Summer 2024. Although she primarily works at the nexus of queer studies, African studies, and migration studies, Emillion is a skilled qualitative researcher committed to learning new methods and engaging in collaborative research projects.

Consequently, she jumped at the opportunity to work with the Sexuality Research Lab. During her first summer, Emillion worked with an interdisciplinary team of faculty and graduate students to compile a comprehensive data set cataloging sex work commentary on social media, with a focus on Reddit, TikTok, Twitter (aka “X”), and YouTube. The finished databank – “The Cyberseduce Collection: Sex Work Commentary on Major Social Platforms“ – contains nearly 6,000 data entries and has already been downloaded over 200 times and cited over 30 times.

Emillion was invited to return to the Sexuality Research Data Lab the following summer. This time, she collaborated with a research team to write an article based on “the sex work databank.” Her co-authored article, “You Need to Stop Persecuting Us!: Exploring Racial Identity and Sex Work Advocacy among Black and White Sex Workers on Twitter/X,” is forthcoming in the Journal of Social Media in Society. Stay tuned for this terrific piece!

Thanks to a generous gift from Distinguished Professor Emerita Mary Jo Bona and her partner Judith Pfenninger, WGSS@SBU will be launching the Mary Jo Bona Distinguished Lecture Series during the 2026-27 academic year. Our gratitude for Mary Jo and Judy’s generosity is matched only by our excitement about planning the inaugural lecture!

Dr. Mary Jo Bona – and her partner Judith Pfenninger – have gifted the WGSS Department $250,000 to establish the Mary Jo Bona Distinguished Lectureship Endowment Fund. Thanks to the New York State match program, WGSS@SBU will receive an additional $125,000 to support the endowed lecture series. We couldn’t be more excited about this gift!

The Mary Jo Bona Distinguished Lectureship Fund will provide support to host an annual public lecture at Stony Brook by a distinguished speaker whose field of expertise falls within the interdisciplinary scope of the department. The funds will be utilized for the speaker’s award/honorarium, travel expenses, and other related expenses, including but not limited to, hosting workshops, reading groups, experimental projects, or activities related to the speaker’s visit to campus.

As many of you know firsthand, WGSS@SBU is thriving today because of Dr. Bona’s profound commitment to growing the field of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies on our campus and beyond. From the moment she arrived at Stony Brook to her retirement this past winter, Dr. Bona’s commitment to service, leadership, and feminist knowledge production was unwavering. Last spring, when we celebrated the end of her final teaching semester with a daylong symposium, we heard from colleague after colleague, mentee after mentee – 22 speakers in all! – about what an impact Mary Jo had not just on their careers but, crucially, on their shared fields of study. The Humanities Institute was packed, wall to wall, for the entire event, as students, faculty, and staff cycled in and out, eager to give Dr. Bona the sendoff she deserves.

Needless to say, Dr. Bona is most certainly missed, but her legacy lives on. The Distinguished Lecture Series will be a wonderful opportunity to continue celebrating Dr. Bona’s contributions to our campus while also continuing to to grow WGSS@SBU by hosting events featuring the most transformative feminist, queer, and trans thinkers.

WGSS@SBU was absolutely delighted to welcome Dr. Joanna Wuest this past fall. Dr. Wuest joins Stony Brook University as Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is a sociolegal scholar focusing on LGBTQ+ rights, health, and conservatism, and she has been and will be teaching courses on trans studies, feminist histories, and the politics of health and science. 

Dr. Joanna Wuest holds a Ph.D. in Political Science and a Graduate Certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to joining Stony Brook, she served as the Fund for Reunion-Cotsen Fellow in LGBT Studies in the Princeton Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts and as Assistant Professor of Politics at Mount Holyoke College. She is the author of Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement (University of Chicago Press, 2023), which was featured on an episode of Radiolab and received an Honorable Mention for the Society for Social Studies of Science’s 2024 Rachel Carson Prize.

Her other academic work has appeared in journals such as Perspectives on Politics, Social Science & Medicine, Law & Social Inquiry, and GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian & Gay Studies as well as various edited volumes. Much of this research has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, the American Association of University Women, and the American Political Science Association. Her public writing has appeared in outlets including the Nation, Boston Review, Psyche, and Dissent, and she has been a Public Fellow at the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI).

We asked Dr. Wuest to tell us more about her recent book, about her research and teaching, and about the other things she’s reading, watching, and doing (or wishes she were doing)!

Tell us about your recent book Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement.

The book is foremostly a history of how scientific and medical expertise has shaped LGBTQ+ civil rights from the 1950s to today’s battles over trans identity and healthcare. It’s a story about the powerful force of scientific ideas concerning what it means to be gay or trans as well as the significant limits of those ideas in the broader struggle for equality.

What are you working on now?

Since writing Born This Way, legal battles over gender-affirming care’s safety and efficacy have become the stuff of national politics. So, I’ve been writing a lot about those scientific disputes, paying close attention to how conservatives have adroitly wielded language about “medical uncertainty” to great effect despite the fact that major domestic and international medical associations defend gender-affirming care practices for youth and adults.

I’ve also been writing a book tentatively titled Church Against State: How Religious Liberty Turned Against Social Welfare & Civil Rights, which observes how many religious liberty legal organizations and their dark money donors have found clever ways to simultaneously undermine LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights and the “administrative state.”

What are your favorite classes to teach?

For a few years, I’ve been teaching a course called “Identity, Science, & Difference,” which I plan to teach at Stony Brook next year under the course title, “Gender & Health.” I love interrogating received notions of “truth” or “just-so” stories about human beings and then exploring how science, law, and social movements have shaped and contested those various renderings of difference. It’s very rewarding to get STEM students thinking about history of science and bioethical questions as well as encouraging humanities-inclined students to spend some time reading scientific studies that have structured the social world.

Is there a particular book that has had a huge influence on your research and/or teaching?

Too many, but Richard Lewontin’s Biology as Ideology brought me to the world of critical science studies. It’s a great book to teach too, because—despite his technical training as an evolutionary biologist—Lewontin was committed to public communication.

What is your favorite television series right now?

I’m obsessed with this very absurdist show called On Cinema at the Cinema. It’s not a television series, but I recently revisited Suzy Eddie Izzard’s Dress to Kill, which is fantastic.

Is there a skill you’ve always wanted to learn?

Any kind of sketching or pencil-based art. That or rock climbing!

E-books, hard copies, or audio books?

Definitely hard copies. I tell students that I am not immune to the distraction economy!