Faculty Members
There are nearly 50 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. These faculty are available to assist students in their studies related to women and gender depending on the faculty member's particular area of expertise.
Faculty Teaching WGST Courses
Sabujkoli Bandopadhyay
Women's amd Gender Studies
Research and teaching interests: Sabujkoli Bandopadhyay's current and future research considers the significance of the concepts of solidarity, empathy, radical love, intersectionality, and the politics of location.
Teaching FAll 2023: WGST 1413 Intro: Women's/Gender Studies; WGST 3023 Feminist Therory; WGST 3123 Feminism and Poopular Culture
Location: BAC 215
Tel: (902) 585-1384
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On Leave beginning July 2023
Research and teaching 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.
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Research and teaching 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.
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Mariah Cooper
Women's and Gender Studies, History and Classics
Research and Teaching Interests: Medieval History, Gender and Legal History, Medieval Criminality and Victimology
Teaching: WGST 1413 (Fall 2023 and Winter 2024)
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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.
Teaching: WGST 2193 Women in Science
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Anne Marie Powers
Department of 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)
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Anne Quéma
Professor, Department of English and Theatre
Research and teaching interests: My research is characterized by interdisciplinarity. Since publishing The Agon of Modernism: Wyndham Lewis’s Allegories, Aesthetics, 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. My current research project explores practices of experimental poetry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a particular focus on Oana Avasilichioaei, Nicole Brossard, Erín Moure, and Rachel Zolf.
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Cynthia Alexander
Department of Politics
902-585-1451
cynthia.alexander@acadiau.ca
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.
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Mike Beazley
Librarian for Women's and Gender Studies
902-585-1523
mike.beazley@acadiau.ca
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Kathryn Bell
Department of Psychology
Research Interests: Dr. Kathryn Bell is a clinical psychologist with broad research interests in interpersonal violence, including intimate partner violence (IPV), sexual assault, and childhood abuse. She is interested in utilizing a contextually-based framework to identify risk factors that are proximally and dynamically associated with episodes of interpersonal violence perpetration and victimization.
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Jennifer Brady
Nutrition and Dietetics, Women's and Gender Studies
Research and Teaching Interests: Health professions roles in social justice and socially just practice; critical and feminist theory
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Rachel Brickner
Department of Politics
902-585-1349
rachel.brickner@acadiau.ca
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James J. Brittain
Department of Sociology
902-585-1292
james.brittain@acadiau.ca
Research and teaching interests: Gender and Revolutionary Social Change, International Development, Latin America, Social Theory, Women in Guerrilla Movements.
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Wanda Campbell
Department of English and Theatre
585-1111
wanda.campbell@acadiau.ca
Research and teaching interests: Creative Writing; Writing by Women, particularly Nineteenth-Century Canadian.
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School of Nutrition
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Rebecca Casey
Department of Sociology
902-585-1494
rebecca.casey@acadiau.ca
Research and teaching interests: Aging, Disability, Work and Employment, Sociology of Health and Illness, Research Methods, Social Inequality, Public Policy.
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Michael Dennis
Department of History and Classics
902-585-1377
michael.dennis@acadiau.ca
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.
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Kelly Dye
School of Business
902-585-1285
kelly.dye@acadiau.ca
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Lesley Frank
Department of Sociology
902-585-1431
lesley.frank@acadiau.ca
Research and teaching interests: food studies, health inequity, family poverty, infant feeding, research methods.
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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.
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Sonia Hewitt
Department of History and Classics
902-585-1277
sonia.hewitt@acadiau.ca
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.
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Anna Kiefte
Department of Physics
902-585-1274
anna.kiefte@acadiau.ca
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Jennifer MacDonald
Department of History and Classics
902-585-1243
je.macdonald@acadiau.ca
Research and teaching interests: Jennifer MacDonald researches and teaches on European history.
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Anna Migliarisi
Department of English and Theatre
902-585-1385
anna.migliarisi@acadiau.ca
Research and teaching interests: Anna Migliarisi's interests have been in women working in/for theatre (as performers, playwrights, directors and producers); the history of women in the theatre; gender and performance. Other research areas are the history, theory and practice of directing; Renaissance and Baroque theatre; theories of performance.
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Can E. Mutlu
Department of Politics
902-585-1293
can.mutlu@acadiau.ca
Research and teaching interests: Borders and mobility; Critical approaches to security studies; International Political Sociology; Research methods/design; Science and technology studies.
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Lisa Narbeshuber
Department of English and Theatre
902-585-1251
lisa.narbeshuber@acadiau.ca
Research and teaching interests: American literature, especially modern American poetry; Sylvia Plath; Ernest Hemingway.
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Randy Newman
Department of Psychology
902-585-1405
randy.newman@acadiau.ca
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).
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Kait Pinder
Department of English and Theatre
Research Interests: Canadian literature, literature and philosophy, modernism, theories of care and compassion, twentieth-century fiction, aesthetics, theories of the novel
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Ann Marie Powers
Department of Sociology
apowers@acadiau.ca
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.
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Lisa Price
Department of Psychology
902-585-1196
lisa.price@acadiau.ca
Research and teaching interests: Lisa Price's current areas of research interest include attachment styles, support and well-being in couples and parent/adolescent relationships, violence in relationships and risky sexual behaviour. Her teaching interests include Human Sexuality, Violence in Relationships, Clinical Psychology, and Psychotherapy for clinical graduate students.
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Vernon Provençal
Department of History and Classics
902-585-1374
vernon.provencal@acadiau.ca
Research and teaching interests: latest publications include Sophist Kings: Persians as Other in Herodotus, Bloomsbury Classical Monographs, 2015.
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Sarah Rudrum
Department of Sociology
902-585-1107
sarah.rudrum@acadiau.ca
Research and teaching interests: Sociology of Health and Illness, Gender and Health, Sociology of Family, Gender and Sexuality, Global Issues, and Qualitative Research Methodology.
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Julia Rombough
Department of History and Classics
Julia.rombough@acadiau.ca
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).
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Christianne Rushton
School of Music
902-585-1330
Christianne.rushton@acadiau.ca
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).
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Donna Seamone
Comparative Religion - Department of History and Classics
902-585-1267
donna.seamone@acadiau.ca
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)
Mary Sweatman
Department of Community Development
902-385-6279
mary.sweatman@acadiau.ca
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.
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Xiaoting Wang
Department of Economics
902-585-1461
xiaoting.wang@acadiau.ca
Research and teaching interests: Industrial organization, antitrust economics
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Jamie Whidden
Department of History and Classics
902-585-1814
jamie.whidden@acadiau.ca
Research and teaching interests: Jamie Whidden completed his doctorate at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, where he studied Egypt and North Africa. He has an interest in patriarchy, particularly as an aspect of Middle Eastern cultures. In all his courses, including Global, African, and Middle Eastern, an important component is the study of patriarchy and its impact upon gender relations.
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Geoffrey Whitehall
Department of Politics
902-585-1288
geoffrey.whitehall@acadiau.ca
Research and teaching interests: Geoffrey Whitehall's research interests are in 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.
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Anna Wilks
Department of Philosophy
902-585-1376
anna.wilks@acadiau.ca
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 natural, artificial and gendered dimensions of “the self.”
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Ying Zhang
Department of Mathematics and Statistics
902- 585-1481
ying.zhang@acadiau.ca
Research activities: Time Series Analysis and Applied Statistics; Statistical Computing and Symbolic Algebra Computing; Statistical Consulting on Biostatistics, Survey and Research Design, Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada.