Program Directors

Sari M. van Anders

Prof. van Anders studies intimacy and hormones in social context, with attention to gender/sex and sexual diversity. Her research focuses principally on social modulation of testosterone via sexuality, partnering/pair bonding, and nurturance. She has developed the Steroid/Peptide Theory of Social Bonds, which informs much of her lab's work. She is particularly interested in how these studies can inform evolutionary understandings of physiological pathways underlying intimacy, as well as the health implications of dynamic endocrinology. She employs noninvasive experimental, correlational, and longitudinal designs in humans to understand bidirectional and causal links between hormones and behavior. We also do a small amount of qualitative work. Her program includes attention to sexually diverse groups, and the development of methods to conduct this research using inclusive research and feminist science practices.

She has two related secondary lines of interest. She conducts quantitative research on the gendered enactment of scientific and academic practice. She also explores gendered sexualities and conceptualizations of gender/sex.

Professor Gunning earned her PhD from Simon Fraser University (2007).

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Kathryn Babayan

Prof. Babayan's research interests include: early modern Iran, Shi'ism, Sufism, and gender and sexuality.

Professor Babay an earned her PhD from Princeton University (1993).

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Sandra Gunning

Professor Gunning specializes in 19th and 20th-century American literature, African American literature, African diaspora studies, interdisciplinary approaches to literature, feminism and gender studies, and travel writing.

Professor Gunning earned her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley (1991).

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David Halperin

Professor Halperin, a scholar of ancient Greek literature and philosophy as well as a historian of sexuality, helped to establish the fields of lesbian and gay studies and queer theory. In addition to cofounding and coediting GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, he has written or edited nine books, including One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (Routledge, 1990); The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (Routledge, 1993); Saint Foucault (Oxford University Press, 1995); What Do Gay Men Want? (University of Michigan Press, 2007; rev. ed. 2009); Gay Shame, with his University of Michigan colleague Valerie Traub, based on a 2003 conference cosponsored by IRWG (University of Chicago Press, 2009); and How To Be Gay(Harvard University Press, forthcoming).

Professor Halperin earned his PhD in classics and humanities from Stanford University (1980).

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Nadine Hubbs

Professor Hubbs is a musicologist and scholar of gender and sexuality. Her work examines gender and the queer in modern musical cultures, and her latest work further incorporates a focus on class. Her first book, The Queer Composition of America’s Sound (University of California Press, 2004) is an award-winning cultural history of the Thomson-Copland circle of mid-20th-century gay composers. She has received support from the CLAGS Martin Duberman Fellowship for her current book project, Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music. It combines LGBTQ and popular music studies with empirical scholarship on class.

Professor Hubbs earned her PhD in music (theory) from the University of Michigan (1990).

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Michelle McClellan

Professor McClellan is especially interested in issues of place and memory, and has embarked on a study of heritage tourism at the sites associated with the Little House… books, by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Professor McClellan earned her PhD from Stanford University (2000).

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Hannah Rosen

Dr. Rosen is a historian whose research and teaching have focused on the social and cultural history of the 19th-century United States, and particularly on the intersection of race and gender in histories of slavery, emancipation, and postemancipation society. She is the author of Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South (University of North Carolina Press, 2009, recipient of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians First Book Prize, the Avery O. Craven Award from the Organization of American Historians, and the Willie Lee Rose Prize from the Southern Association of Women’s Historians).

Her current research treats African American experiences surrounding death and mourning during and after the Civil War and the increasing segregation of southern cemeteries in the postemancipation period. In this project, she also explores historical memory and commemoration through black women’s efforts to reclaim and restore African American burial sites.

Dr. Rosen earned her PhD in history from the University of Chicago (1999).

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Valerie Traub

Professor Traub’s research concerns gender and sexuality in early modern England. She is the author of The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England, which won the best book of 2002 award from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women. Other books include Desire & Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (1992) and two co-edited collections: Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects (1996) and Gay Shame (2009).

Her current projects are “Mapping Embodiment in the Early Modern West: A Prehistory of Normality,” which analyzes the emergence of new discourses of gender, sexuality, race, and class in 16th- and 17th-century anatomical and cartographic illustrations; and “Making Sexual Knowledge: Essays in the History of Sexuality.” She sits on the advisory boards of PMLA, GLQ, and Studies in English Literature. She is the recipient of the John D’Arms Award for graduate mentoring and the Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award.

Professor Traub earned her PhD in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (1990).

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