Dr. Jayati Lal was recently in the Sociology and Women’s Studies Departments at the University of Michigan. She will be working on a project to examine the ways in which women’s familial and domestic identities are being reshaped by consumer culture among the new middle class, and through it, trace the formations of ‘middle class identity.’
Dr. Rosemary Polanco (Institute for Health Policy Studies at the University of California, San Francisco), will be working on an HIV/AIDS research project in the city of Detroit. The project, “Deciding to Test for HIV,” examines the testing behaviors of Detroiters at risk of HIV infection and investigates the conditions that facilitate and hinder voluntary testing, treatment initiation, and treatment adherence in this population.
Dr. Pilar Rodriquez’s (Department of Sociology, University of Almeria, Spain) area of interest involves the relationship between sex and gender, specifically qualitative differences in sex and gender relations in developing versus developed countries. At present, her work concentrates on violence against women (natives and immigrants both) in developed countries, such as Spain and the U.S., paying attention to the ways different societies and groups organize the relationships that revolve around love, as well as when love turns violent.
Dr. Lynn Shutters’ (Department of English, Idaho State University) research focuses on gender, historiography and the reception of classical antiquity in the later Middle Ages. During her time at UM she will work on her book, Female Pagans and Pagan Femininity in Late Medieval Literature, which explores contradictory representations of classical pagan women in fourteenth-fifteenth century European texts. The book develops in new and significant ways two strands of medieval studies: the medieval reception of classical antiquity and medieval gender studies.