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!

This fall, Dr. Angela Jones joined WGSS@SBU as a Senior IDEA Scholar. They are an award-winning teacher and writer with expertise in African American political thought and protest, sex work, race, gender, sexuality, feminist theory, Black feminisms, and queer methodologies and theory. Dr. Jones is a long-time friend of WGSS@SBU, and we couldn’t be more excited for them to be officially a part of our community. 

Dr. Angela Jones is the author of Camming: Money, Power, and Pleasure in the Sex Industry (NYU Press, 2020) and African American Civil Rights: Early Activism and the Niagara Movement (Praeger, 2011). They are a co-editor of Sex Work Today: Erotic Labor in the 21st Century (NYU Press, 2024). Jones is also a co-editor of the three-volume After Marriage Equality book series (Routledge, 2018). Jones has also edited two other anthologies: The Modern African American Political Thought Reader: From David Walker to Barack Obama (Routledge, 2012), and A Critical Inquiry into Queer Utopias (Palgrave, 2013). Jones is the author of African American Activism and Political Engagement: An Encyclopedia of Empowerment (Bloomsbury, 2023) and Black Lives Matter: A Reference Handbook (current available for pre-order from Bloomsbury).

In addition to publishing article in various peer-reviewed academic journals, they also write for public audiences and have published in venues like Contexts (digital), The Conversation, the Nevada Independent, Peepshow Magazine, PopMatters, and Salon. Dr. Jones is currently working on a mainstream trade monograph under contract with the legacy feminist press Seal Press, which is tentatively called “Sex Lives: Erotic Power and the Social Life of Sexuality.”

We asked Dr. Jones to answer a few questions about their research and teaching, their experiences in academia, and about what they do when they aren’t writing all these brilliant books and articles!

Tell us about the collection you co-edited Sex Work Today: Erotic Labor in the 21st Century.

Sex Work Today was a long time in the making. Bernadette Barton, Barb Brents, and I started the project not long before the lockdown phases of the pandemic, so finally, getting this book out into the world felt extra good. The anthology features thirty-one original essays by sex workers, advocates, researchers, and activists. The essays engage intersectional and transnational frames and are short, crisp, and accessible.

Can you also tell us about Black Lives Matter: A Reference Handbook (which will be released this May)?

Black Lives Matter: A Reference Handbook is a book I co-authored with Shaonta’ “Shay” Allen and Simone Durham. The book documents the creation and growth of BLM and profiles leading and influential activists and organizations associated with the movement. It includes a range of personal essays that explore the persistent problems of police violence and racial discrimination in the USA. There are also chapters, including governmental data and excerpts of primary documents, as well as an annotated bibliography of related books, news articles, reports, and podcasts.

When this book is published, it will also feel extra special. My co-authors, Simone and Shay, were navigating a lot: a dissertation defense and a transition to a tenure-track job, among other things. Working on this with them and the things we learned from each other was a gift.

What was the best class you took as a student?

The best class I took as an undergraduate was my senior seminar in sociology on gender, race, sexuality, and the body. It was the moment bell hooks broke my heart. We were reading from an anthology, and we got to her essay, “Selling Hot Pussy: Representations of Black Female Sexuality in the Cultural Marketplace” (from Black Looks). It was then that I realized that a number of my Black feminist mentors (hooks, Collins, Lorde) were brilliant on so much but also oh so wrong about sex and sexuality.

My favorite graduate school class was the political economy seminar I took with Agnes Heller. She had such a brilliant mind. Although she was small in stature, she filled the room. We dissected and discussed “Estranged Labor” in ways I never had. In particular, our conversations about the species being forever changed my relationship with labor. That course pushed me to think more concretely and differently about the type of world I want to live in and what role I might continue to play in the movements getting us there.

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

Hands-down W.E.B DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folks. It is not only one of my favorite books (alongside Alice Walker’s The Color Purple), but also profoundly affected my research and writing. DuBois’s conceptualizations of the veil and double consciousness have been influential academically but have also helped me personally to process living in a white supremacist world. I wrote about it here. Critically, his field-defining concepts were born out of autotheory. DuBois pioneered innovative research methods—advocating for mixed methods and fieldwork, using colorful data images, and recognizing that autoethnography and oral histories—that beautiful storytelling aren’t antithetical to scientific rigor—the personal breathes life into theory. DuBois knew and told us that theory and data are political—that research and the stories we tell can foster social justice and change.

What are you listening to right now?

I am currently listening to Lamya H’s book, Hijab Butch Blues. I still have about a third left, but it is so good! Music—I listen to a lot of R&B, Neo-Soul, and old school Hip-Hop, Trip-Hop, and dancehall reggae. Lately, CoCo Jones, Muni Long, and Snoh Aalegra have been in heavy rotation.

How do you like to relax?

How I relax depends on what my bodymind needs. If I’m feeling chill but still creative, I love to write or read in front of a fire. If the world and its people have been thunderously loud and evil, you can find me, candles lit, sage in the air, doing yin yoga and meditation on my mat. And sometimes, my spirit needs ratchet joy with rest, and I binge trashy love shows on Netflix and call it research.

Dogs or cats?

Cats—definitely, cats! I have two, Blaze and Simon, coming soon to a Zoom screen near you. I vibe with cats. Most dogs ain’t got no chill, lol—that and a huge dog bit me as a kid, and so, sure, I suppose I still have feelings about that.

Dr. Manisha Desai joined Stony Brook University in Fall 2023 as the Executive Director of the Center for Changing Systems of Power. She is jointly appointed in WGSS and Sociology, and we could not be happier to welcome her into our department. In her short time here, Dr. Desai been a steadfast and fierce advocate for climate justice, artistic freedom, transnational feminisms, and student protest movements. 

Dr. Manisha Desai’s research delves into transnational feminism, women’s human rights, gender and globalization, and contemporary Indian society to theorize with marginalized communities in their pursuit of social justice. Methodologically, her work investigates power dynamics in knowledge production and advocates for co-produced knowledge to transform unequal social relations. She employs a critical feminist lens that seeks to decolonize knowledge production and contribute to social justice even as it problematizes those efforts.

Currently, Dr. Desai is engaged in research on women’s rights, land rights, and climate justice in India and the Northeastern United States. Her work aims to understand how Dalit women farmers in India and women farmers of color in the United States bring together issues of land rights, and women’s economic, social, and political rights to address climate change. She is also involved in the Global Research and Action Network on the Eco-Social Contract at the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development. Here, she collaborates with academics, community members, and policymakers from various countries to promote climate justice.

Additionally, Dr. Desai is working on reframing diversity, equity, and inclusion as justice, equity, and transformation to ensure that issues of systemic racism and inequalities are addressed structurally. Committed to decolonizing knowledge production and academia, she serves on the Steering Committee of the Federation of Feminist Journal Editors. The Federation aims to establish a feminist knowledge commons outside commercial publishing to facilitate the free circulation of feminist knowledge across borders and language barriers.

We asked Dr. Desai to tell us more about her social justice work, how this connects to her research and teaching, and the role art and literature play in her life!

Tell us about the Center for Changing Systems of Power.

The Center for Changing Systems of Power is a collaborative space for furthering epistemic, aesthetic, and social justice locally and globally.

Epistemically, we are committed to co-producing knowledge with those within and outside the academy to develop solidarities of epistemologies that will not only illuminate interlocking relationships of socio-economic and political inequalities but also how communities locally and globally are challenging those systems of power. Currently, our affiliates are focused on ecological, health, and carceral systems that are in urgent need of transformation.

Aesthetically, through our artivist in residence program, we seek to showcase practices and visions of art that draw upon dynamic local and global traditions and practices that envision a better world for us all.

Socially, the Center is committed to promoting justice, both within and beyond the academy, in communities and causes on Long Island, greater New York, and globally.

We bring together academics, community groups, artists, advocates, and public policy makers by sponsoring dialogues and debate as well as teach-ins over issues of importance within and outside SBU.

How does your work with CCSP connect to your feminist research and teaching?

The Centers three lenses of epistemic, aesthetic and social justice emerge directly from my transnational feminist research and teaching. As a feminist scholar activist and teacher, I’ve always been attentive to knowledge produced outside the academy and incorporated activist and artistic reflections in my research and teaching.

Similarly, collaboration with colleagues across disciplines has informed my writing and teaching and that is also how the Center functions.

Ensuring that the Center’s programming is inclusive of students and staff and community members is another way that my feminist sensibilities inform the work of the Center.

What is the most important thing for researchers to keep in mind when collaborating with communities outside academia?

This question reminds me of the by now classic book Participation: The New Tyranny? by Bill Cooke and Uma Kothari that critiqued the ways in which participation was becoming mandated in the development field.

Something similar seems to be happening with community engagement as everyone from federal funding agencies to universities want researchers to collaborate with communities outside academia.

Given this, it’s crucial to be honest about our motivations, i.e., why do we seek collaboration, who benefits, before thinking about how we work together.

What was your favorite class as an undergrad?

I was a microbiology major and chemistry minor in a very structured curriculum with little freedom so can’t say that I had a favorite. But I went to a Jesuit college and us non-Catholics had to take a course called Moral Science. As a 16-yr old starting college it intrigued me that ethical issues were framed as a science for the heathens. So, were the Bible and science being seen as equivalent? I enjoyed such questions and conversations in that class though not sure what our Jesuit priest thought of that.

What is the best novel you’ve read recently?

Not sure about the best, but I recently read a book of short stories called What we Fed to the Manticore by Talia Lakshmi Kolluri that stayed with me for a long time. The narrator of each story is an animal, a donkey, vultures, the mythical Manticore of the title, and each is set in a different location from Gaza to India to the US northern plains. Each is a haunting tale of inter-species relationships and life on earth that is very of our time and yet also timeless.

Given my own work on eco-social justice and thinking of more than human rights and earth jurisprudence it spoke to me in ways that it might not have had I read it at another time.

What is your favorite museum?

Don’t have a favorite but among the ones I go to and enjoy on a regular basis is a little gem called the New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain, CT. New Britain is one of those small New England industrial towns that have lost their manufacturing base with few material remnants of a once vibrant community, this museum being one of them. As the oldest museum featuring American art, it showcases an amazing array of artists. That’s where I first saw Kara Walker’s cut-out paintings and recently saw the Brazilian American artist Vik Muniz who assembles large scale collages with everyday materials and then photographs them.

Early bird or night owl?

Definitely an early bird.