Staff

Director: Dorothy L. Hodgson

Dorothy L. Hodgson is Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University and President-elect of the national Association for Feminist Anthropology. The first social scientist to direct the IRW, she is focused on further expanding the Institute's interdisciplinary partnerships and developing additional programs offering multinational perspectives. As a historical anthropologist, she has worked in Tanzania, East Africa, for over twenty years on such topics as gender, ethnicity, cultural politics, colonialism, nationalism, modernity, the missionary encounter, transnational organizing, and the indigenous rights movement.

She is the author of Once Intrepid Warriors: Gender, Ethnicity and the Cultural Politics of Maasai Development (Indiana, 2001) and The Church of Women: Gender, Power and Missionary Encounters in Tanzania (Indiana, 2005) and editor of Gendered Modernities: Ethnographic Perspectives (Palgrave, 2001), Rethinking Pastoralism in Africa: Gender, Culture and the Myth of the Patriarchal Pastoralist (James Currey & Ohio 2000), and, with Sheryl McCurdy, “Wicked” Women and the Reconfiguration of Gender in Africa (Heinemann, 2001). 

She recently co-edited a special volume of WSQ (formerly Women’s Studies Quarterly) with Ethel Brooks on Activisms, and is currently completing a book about the dynamics of civil society, transnational advocacy and the state in Africa tentatively titled Positionings: Postcolonial Politics in a Neoliberal World.

Her work has been supported by awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Fulbright-Hays, American Council for Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, American Philosophical Society, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Associate Director: Beth Hutchison

Beth Hutchison is a member of the graduate faculty of the Department of Women's and Gender Studies, where she teaches courses in sexuality and cultural studies. Her current research examines the activities and local/national impact of the grassroots organization Blood Sisters, groups of lesbians in several cities who were galvanized by the first attempts in the early 1980s to insure blood supply safety by discouraging gay men from donating blood. The women organized to donate blood because "their brothers" were unable to, signalling an important shift in how lesbians and gay men understood their interrelationships and representing an initial phase in LGBTQ community responses to the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Office Manager: Marlene Importico

Marlene Importico, the logistical wizard of the IRW, ensures the smooth running of our lectures and seminars and coordinates the efforts of our work-study students.  She is responsible for purchasing, accounting, scheduling, and communications functions.  Her interests include domestic violence, reproductive rights, women and work, affirmative action, and progressive social policy.

IRW Learning Community Coordinator: Abigail Sara Lewis

Abigail Sara Lewis is doctoral candidate in the History Department at Rutgers. Her dissertation examines the racial, religious, and gender activism of the Young Women's Christian Association in post-World War II America. She has been an instructor in the Women's and Gender Studies and History departments, teaching both introductory and upper division courses.

Graduate Assistant: Lana Sacks

Lana Sacks is a class of 2006 alumna of Rutgers College, where she received her B.A. in History and minored in Art History. Currently, Lana is enrolled in the Women's and Gender Studies graduate program, where she is working towards her M.A. Lana also works with the Institute for Women and Art as a grant-funded Project Assistant. She hopes to integrate her personal experiences as a biracial woman and recreational interest in Morrissey into investigations on how racial, sexual and gender identities are represented, constructed, challenged and exploited in modern popular culture.

Undergraduate Assistant: Danese Brielle Nalence

Danese Brielle Nalence is currently an undergraduate of Douglass College where she is double majoring in Psychology and Women's and Gender Studies. On campus she is involved with Radigals, the Women's and Gender Studies Undergraduate Association, and serves as the Program Coordinatior for NAMI-Rutgers, a group that aims to raise mental health awareness. She is also a scholar in the Institute for Women's Leadership Certificate Program and works outside of the IRW as a Safe House Advocate for the non-profit organization, SAFE in Hunterdon, NJ. Her interests include alternative feminist media, and in the future she hopes to utilize feminist ideologies within psychology-related research projects.