Faculty Members

There are nearly 35 faculty members at Acadia who are involved in the Women's and Gender Studies program, either through teaching its courses, doing research in the area, or by participating in committee work. 

Faculty Teaching WGST Courses (2025-26)

Women's and Gender Studies
Research interests: African Diaspora migration and settlement within the Americas and Caribbean; Black Feminist Theory; Critical Race Theory; Postcolonial Theory; narrative analysis; the intersections of race, gender, class and sexuality; diversity and equity issues in education; social justice and social change; qualitative and ethnographic inquiry
Teaching: WGST 1413 Introduction to Women's and Gender Studies, WGST 3203 Black Women in Politics, WGST 3703 Gender and Race: The Changing Face of Workplace Politics, WGST 3803 Queer Studies, WGST 4913 Women of the African Diaspora
 
Women's and Gender Studies, Environmental and Sustainability Studies
Research and teaching interests: Critical perspectives on work and unemployment; Feminist political economy; Social reproduction; Natural resource economies; Welfare state; Race, class, gender; Environmental justice;
Teaching: WGST 1413 Introduction to Women's and Gender Studies, WGST 2013 Environmental Justice and Equity, WGST 4923 Contemporary Feminist Issues
 
Randy Newman
Psychology
Research and teaching interests: Randy Lynn Newman has research interests in the area of reading and speech perception mechanisms, cognitive neuroscience. Reading involves the coordination of several processes including the encoding of an orthographic representation, the assignment of phonology to written text, and the integration of these processes with semantic representations.
Teaching: WGST 2193 Women in Science
 
Sociology
Research and teaching interests: gender and social organization; symbolism (women and religion); Newfoundland and Atlantic Canada; intercultural communication and cultural diversity education
Teaching: WGST 2906 Women & Gender in the Modern World and SOCI 2853 the Anthropology of Magic and Religion (Open Acadia - online course)
 
Laura Robinson
English and Theatre, Women's and Gender Studies
Research and teaching interests: Women’s writing and children’s literature, particularly Canadian, feminist and queer theory, gender and sexuality, L.M. Montgomery.
Teaching: WGST 3123 Feminism and Popular Culture
 
Sociology
Research interests: Cultural Sociology, Youth Culture, Gender, Sexuality, Education, Qualitative Methods
Teaching: WGST 2403 Gender and Sexuality/1; WGST 3403 Gender and Sexuality/2
 
 
Contributing Faculty Members: Teaching & Governance
Coordinator, Women's and Gender Studies
Department of English and Theatre

Research and teaching interests: My research is characterized by interdisciplinarity. Since publishing The Agon of Modernism: Wyndham Lewis’s AllegoriesAesthetics, and Politics in 1999, I have published articles on legal discourse and same-sex partnership, law and literature, historiography, Gothic fiction, fiction and the visual arts, and Canadian modernism. My book, Power and Legitimacy (2015), examines the relationship between power and language in the context of interdisciplinary analyses of jurisprudence, statutory law, and literature. More recently, my research publications have revolved around practices of experimental poetry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a particular focus on Oana Avasilichioaei, Nicole Brossard, Liz Howard, Dionne Brand, m. nourbeSe philip, and Rachel Zolf. I am currently writing a book on the poetry of Erín Moure, a major experimental poet in Canada.

Cynthia Alexander
Department of Politics

Research and teaching interests: Identity politics in Canada; First Nations Peoples in Canada; Canadian politics and government; Comparative public policy; Public administration; New media technologies; Northern studies in Canada; Intersectionality of oppressions in Canada; Indigenous epistemologies and political contexts; Place-based knowledge and narrative; Discursive democracy and social justice.

Jennifer Brady
School of Nutrition
Research and Teaching Interests: Health professions roles in social justice and socially just practice; critical and feminist theory
 

Rachel Brickner
Department of Politics

Research and teaching interests: Workers' activism and labour rights, especially for women, migrants, and public sector employees; democratic citizenship in theory and practice; civil society and social movements; politics of the United States and Latin America; gender and development.
 

James J. Brittain
Department of Sociology

Research and teaching interests: Gender and Revolutionary Social Change, International Development, Latin America, Social Theory, Women in Guerrilla Movements.

Wanda Campbell
Department of English and Theatre

Research and teaching interests: Creative Writing; Writing by Women, particularly Nineteenth-Century Canadian.

Rabindra Chaulagain

Sociology

Research and teaching interests: Necropolitics, Race, Gender, Sexuality, Qualitative Methodology, Global Postcolonialism, Indigenous Anticolonialism

Liesel Carlsson
School of Nutrition
Research and teaching interests: Global Food Security and Sovereignty, Food Systems and Sustainability, Food Culture, Health Promotion and Policy, and Sports Nutrition.
 

Rebecca Casey
Department of Sociology

Research and teaching interests:  Aging, Disability, Work and Employment, Sociology of Health and Illness, Research Methods, Social Inequality, Public Policy.

Erin Crandall
Department of Politics

Research and teaching interests: Canadian government and politics; Judicial politics and courts; Election law; Gender and politics
 

Michael Dennis
Department of History and Classics

Research and teaching interests: The labour movement in the South and the United States in the late twentieth century; intellectual and cultural history of 20th century America, youth subcultures, and higher education.

Kelly Dye
School of Business

Lesley Frank
Department of Sociology

Research and teaching interests: food studies, health inequity, family poverty, infant feeding, research methods.

Chelsea Gardner
Department of History and Classics

Research and teaching interests: Dr. Gardner is a Classical Archaeologist specializing in the history and material culture of the ancient Greek and Roman world. Her teaching covers many areas of the ancient Mediterranean, including Greek & Latin language and literature, the history of the Graeco-Roman world from the prehistory to late antiquity, mythology, religion & sacred space, and women, gender & sexuality in antiquity. Her research is centred around archaeological exploration in southern Greece.

Sonia Hewitt
Department of History and Classics

Research and teaching interests: Sonia Hewitt is a Roman archaeologist, and her area of interest is the archaeology of daily life in Italy and the provinces, especially domestic architecture and baths. She has participated in excavations in Greece and Tunisia, and has conducted fieldwork at the Roman site Volubilis in Morocco. She is currently working on the neighborhood baths in urban and rural Roman Africa.

Jennifer MacDonald
Department of History and Classics

Research and teaching interests: Jennifer MacDonald researches and teaches on European history.

Lisa Narbeshuber
Department of English and Theatre

Research and teaching interests: American literature, especially modern American poetry; Sylvia Plath; Ernest Hemingway.

Randy Newman
Department of Psychology

Research and teaching interests: Randy Lynn Newman has research interests in the area of reading and speech perception mechanisms, cognitive neuroscience. Reading involves the coordination of several processes including the encoding of an orthographic representation, the assignment of phonology to written text, and the integration of these processes with semantic representations. Understanding the dynamics of these processes is a central focus of cognitive science. One of the more contentious issues in reading research has to do with how skilled readers use the phonology of words during reading. For example, there is disagreement over whether skilled readers are able to rely solely on the orthography of familiar words when reading for meaning, thus ignoring phonology, or whether phonological representations are always activated during reading. My research objective is to delineate the circumstances and mechanisms by which skilled readers use phonology when reading single words as well as meaningful text. This goal is accomplished by using traditional behavioral paradigms such as masked priming, in combination with cutting edge brain imaging techniques, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and event related brain potentials (ERPs).

Ann Marie Powers
Department of Sociology

Research and teaching interests: Ann Marie Powers teaches Women in the Modern World, Introduction to Women's Studies, Cross Cultural Belief Systems, Introduction to Cultural Anthropology.  Her research interests are in gender and social organization; symbolism (women and religion); Newfoundland and Atlantic Canada; intercultural communication and cultural diversity education.

Shelley Price

School of Business Administration

Reseach and teaching interests: Dr. Price’s teaching, research and service work relates to expanding trauma-informed and culturally humble approaches to management and management education with a keen interest in advancing the missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIAP+ (MMIWG2S) Calls for Justice and the Truth and Reconciliation (TRC) Calls to Action. She works with Indigenous storytelling methodologies, collective storytelling practices, community-led and participatory action research, trans-local learning, and art-based ways of connecting with wisdoms from the lands.

Julia Rombough
Department of History and Classics
Research and teaching interests: Dr. Rombough is a historian of gender, the senses, early modern Europe and the Mediterranean. Her interests centre around the gender, women’s histories, urban life, social history, bodily experience, and sensory experience in early modern Italy (1450 – 1700).
 
Sarah Rudrum
Department of Sociology
Research and teaching interests: Sociology of Health and Illness, Gender and Health, Sociology of Family, Gender and Sexuality, Global Issues, and Qualitative Research Methodology.
 

Christianne Rushton
School of Music

Research and teaching interests: Christianne Rushton created a course in Opera History that explores the representation of gender and sexuality in Opera. The course, “Sex, Gender and Stereotypes in Opera”, begins by examining the role of the Castrato (a male singer with the voice of a female) and will continue through the development of the trouser-role (a mezzo-soprano portraying men and boys).

Donna Seamone
Comparative Religion - Department of History and Classics

Research and teaching interests: Ritual studies and performance studies; Cultural anthropology especially issues of representation, race ethnicity and gender:  ethnography/fieldwork in the study of lived experience; relation of media and representation to lived religion; Health, illness, and religion & medical anthropology; New religious movement and emergent religion; Religion on the internet; Study of "liberation" movements; Life writing & gender: spiritual biography (western and contemporary), life history, and illness narratives; Nature-Body-Spirit relationships in religion and culture (ritual and ecology, ecofeminism) 

Natalie Swain
Department of History and Classics

Research and teaching interests: I am very much a polydisciplinary scholar, and my work engages with the intersections of various topics, including Latin language and literature, narratology, critical reception studies (interrogating colonial and post-colonial narratives of the ancient Mediterranean), gender studies, comics studies, video game studies, critical race theory, queer histories, disability studies, media  studies, and metamodernism. CLAS 3123 Gender & Sexuality in the Greco-Roman World

Mary Sweatman
Community Development
Research and teaching interests: Mary Sweatman’s interests revolve around community service-learning and partnerships, and community issues concerning inequity. Her current projects include collaborative work on local food systems and experiential education in community, recreation provisions for rural low-income families, and rural homelessness. Mary is also the faculty coordinator of Axcess Acadia, an inclusive post-secondary education option at Acadia.

 

Geoffrey Whitehall
Department of Politics

Research and teaching interests: Sovereignty and Preemption; and Aesthetics of International Politics.  He teaches courses in Law, Politics and Government; Theoretical Approaches to International Politics; Pop Culture and World Politics; Politics of International Law; the Politics of New Global Technologies; and Human Rights. 

Anna Wilks
Department of Philosophy

Research and teaching interests: metaphysics and epistemology in Kant and Early Modern Philosophy. Her current research topics include the notions of substance, causality, consciousness, and the self in theories of cognition and ethics. She is also interested in the practical application of Kant’s theory of experience to problems in biology, artificial intelligence and gender studies - specifically with respect to the naturalartificial and gendered dimensions of “the self.”