Professor Carlos Ulises Decena is an interdisciplinary scholar, whose work straddles the humanities and social sciences and whose intellectual projects engage and blur the boundaries among critical ethnic, queer and feminist studies and social justice. His areas of interest include critical theory as well as social and cultural analysis, with a particular emphasis on transnationalism and diaspora in the American continent, US Latinoamerica and the Caribbean. Other areas of interest include queer of color critique and critical public health. Professor Decena’s first book, Tacit Subjects: Belonging and Same-Sex Desire among Dominican Immigrant Men, was published by Duke University Press in 2011. He is currently at work on two book-length projects: Body Portals: Embodiment in Early 21st Century Caribbean and Latinoamerican Artivism and Re-membered Country: Sexuality, Television, and Dominican Transnational Cultures. His work has appeared on the Journal of the National Medical Association, Social Text (a special issue titled “The Border Next Door which he coedited with Margaret Gray), Journal of Urban Health, Papeles de Población, AIDS Care and GLQ. He is also a co-editor of a Special Dossier on Latino Immigrants in New York State. Since joining the Rutgers faculty in 2004, he has been teaching and mentoring students in two departments, Women’s and Gender Studies and Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies. He has introduced a range of exciting new courses, such as Introduction to the Critical Study of Masculinities, The Color of AIDS: The Politics of Race during the AIDS Crisis, Dominican Transnational Cultures, Gender and Sexualities in the Caribbean, and Immigrant States: Jersey’s Global Routes. Carlos Decena CV
Erin Evans is an Educator for the Institute for Health and Socio-Economic Policy of the National Nurses United. Erin’s education reflects her interest in interdisciplinary studies. She received her BA in English Literature and Psychology (2003) and her MA in Political Science (2008) from San Francisco State University. Erin went on to receive her Ph.D. in Sociology from University of California, Irvine in 2016. Specializing in Political Sociology, Erin’s research focuses on collective behavior and social movements, science studies, and institutionalization. Her work is concerned primarily with social movement outcomes, and explores how activists affect change in institutions that are both political and not explicitly political, like laboratory science, regulatory agencies, and mass media. This work is both domestically and internationally focused, including seeking to explain the international diffusion of environmental protest and the effects of constitutional law protecting the environment and animals. Erin has taught courses on a wide range of topics including Politics as a Social Institution, Social Psychology, and Juvenile Delinquency and Justice. Erin Evans CV
Alana Lee Glaser is an Educator for the Institute for Health and Socio-Economic Policy of the National Nurses United. She received her BA in Cultural Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her PhD in Anthropology from Northwestern University. Research foci include domestic and service sector work, migration, gender, race, aging, labor process, and political economy. Supported by the Wenner-Gren, her ethnographic research chronicles the impact of recent labor law implementation (the 2010 New York Domestic Worker Bill of Rights) on the multicultural immigrant-led organizations responsible for its passage as well as its unexpected sequelae in the daily lives of individual West Indian Caribbean and West African women working as caregivers in New York City. She has taught courses on cultural anthropology, domestic labor in the United States, post-recession neoliberal globalization, and humanitarian technologies. Alana Lee Glaser CV
Professor Heidi Hoechst is a lead educator at National Nurses United. She holds a Ph.D. in U.S. Cultural Studies and Literature from the University of California, San Diego. In her classes, she uses socio-cultural systems and structural analysis as a framework for understanding structured advantages and disadvantages that cumulatively contribute to compound socio-economic, health, and life disparities. Her classes build on class based analytics to bring historical context and strategically engaged critical thinking models to movements for economic and social justice. She has taught in a wide array of interdisciplinary Women’s, Gender, Feminist, Sexuality, Critical Race, Critical Legal, Cultural, and American Studies programs at Tulane University; the University of California, Santa Barbara; Cornell University; Auburn State Correctional Facility; the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the University of California, San Diego. Heidi Hoechst CV
Christopher Nielsen is an Educator for the Institute for Health and Socio-Economic Policy of the National Nurses United. He has a BA in anthropology and linguistics from Brigham Young University, an MA in Spanish also from BYU, and a PhD in Latin American literature and cultural studies from the University of Pittsburgh. His research and teaching interests range widely, from the global circulation of psychoactive substances and the political economy of migration to political philosophy and theories of digital labor. His current research focuses on the crucial role care work plays in emerging movements to resist and transcend the inequality, precariousness, and violence that have come to characterize our increasingly automated, virtualized, and datafied global economy. Professor Nielsen has publications forthcoming on the political aesthetics of power, violence, and the drug trade in Mexico and was co-translator of the Colombian edition of philosopher Alberto Toscano’s book Fanaticism. He has taught Spanish language and Latin American literature and culture at BYU and Pitt, philosophy at Utah Valley University, and continuing education on the technological restructuring of healthcare for NNU. Christopher Nielsen CV
Professor Yana van der Meulen Rodgers teaches courses and conducts research in feminist economics, labor studies, economics of the family, development economics, and nutrition and food policy. She is Graduate Director in the Women’s and Gender Studies department at Rutgers University. Many of her studies have focused on East and South Asian economies, and she has traveled to and lived in Asia to conduct her research. She has published numerous articles in refereed economics journals and has written a book entitled Maternal Employment and Child Health: Global Issues and Policy Solutions (Edward Elgar Publishing, November 2011). Professor Rodgers became President of the International Association for Feminist Economics in July 2013, and she has served as an associate editor for Feminist Economics since 2005. She has also worked regularly as a consultant for the World Bank, the United Nations, and the Asian Development Bank. She is also is an avid runner and enjoys racing, especially half-marathons. Yana Rodgers CV
Professor Kyla Schuller is Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, where she teaches and researches the intersections between race, gender, sexuality, and the sciences. Her areas of focus include histories of eugenics and reproduction, nineteenth-century American Studies, popular culture, and critical race and queer theory. She is currently at work on her first book project, “The Sentimental Politics of Life: Race, Sexuality and Biopower in the Nineteenth-Century United States.” This manuscript explores the meaning and materiality of race, sexuality, and heredity in the decades prior to the debut of the “gene.” Examining such topics as the racial politics of the first generation of female physicians, the role of birth control in black uplift struggles, and non-Darwinian evolutionary theories, the book argues that nineteenth-century middle-class culture developed a deep investment in improving the biological stock of the national population. She has held a prestigious ACLS New Faculty Fellowship and positions at UC San Diego, UC Berkeley, the UC Humanities Research Institute, and Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Her peer-reviewed articles explore the cultural history of cosmetic surgery in the Americas, the role of sentimentalism in the paleontological sciences, the politics of the blockbuster film Avatar, and other subjects in feminist science studies. At Rutgers, she teaches courses on Gender and Science, Medicine and Biopolitics, Gender and Popular Culture, and Critical Sexualities Studies and is delighted by the talent and curiosity of Rutgers students. Kyla Schuller CV
Professor Julia Wartenberg is an Educator for the Institute for Health and Socio-Economic Policy of the National Nurses United. She received her B.A. in Sociology from Fairfield University, her M.A. in Sociology from American University, and her PhD in Sociology from University of Virginia. Her areas of research focus on women in violent conflicts, women and unpaid care in the U.S. economy, and the intersection of race/ethnicity and gender with economic stratification. Her work has appeared in the SAGE Multimedia Encyclopedia of Women in Today’s World, The Gendered Perspectives on International Development Resource Bulletin and other journals. Prior to joining NNU, Julia worked on disability issues at the American Foundation for the Blind (2013-2014), was Director of the Global Women’s Project at the Center of Concern (2010-2013), and spent a year (2009-2010) at the International Law Institute where her work focused on legal and technical infrastructure issues in international development. In addition, she has served as an Adjunct Faculty member at George Mason University in the Department of Global Affairs and has served as a guest lecturer on a variety of topics at several universities.Julia Wartenberg CV