IRW Staff

Ousseina D. Alidou is Professor in the Department of African, Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Literatures and the Graduate Program in Comparative Literature. She is a theoretical linguist whose research focuses mainly on the study of women’s orality and literacy practices in African Muslim societies; African Muslim women’s Agency and gender justice; African women’s literatures; Gendered discourses of identity and the politics of cultural production in African Muslim societies.

Her latest book is Writing through the Visual and Virtual: Inscribing Language, Literature and in Francophone Africa and Culture in Africa and the Caribbean, co-edited with Renée Larrier (Lexington Books, 2015). She is also the author of Muslim Women in Postcolonial Kenya: Representation, Leadership and Social Change (University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), Post-Conflict Reconstruction in Africa (Africa World Press, 2006),  Engaging Modernity: Muslim Women and the Politics of Agency in Postcolonial Niger (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), and A Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles against Structural Adjustment in African Universities (Africa World Press, 2000). 

 Ousseina has a long history of involvement with IRW and was a seminar fellow during the 2008-2009 academic year during the theme, “The Culture of Rights/The Rights of Culture.” A widely published author, Ousseina brings a strong commitment to feminist scholarship and community-building.

Sarah Tobias's work bridges academia and public policy. A feminist theorist and LGBT activist, she is co-author of Policy Issues Affecting Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Families (University of Michigan Press, 2007) and co-editor of Trans Studies: The Challenge to Hetero/Homo Normativities (Rutgers University Press, 2016), which won the 2017 Sylvia Rivera Award for the Best Book in Transgender Studies from the City University of New York Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies. With Nicole R. Fleetwood, she co-edited “The New Status Quo: Essays on Poverty in the United States and Beyond,” a special issue of Feminist Formations (Spring 2021).

Sarah is co-editor with Arlene Stein of The Perils of Populism (2022), Feeling Democracy: Emotional Politics in the New Millennium (2024), and Public Catastrophes, Private Losses (2025), all books in IRW’s Feminist Bookshelf series with Rutgers University Press. She is also the founding editor of Rejoinder, an online journal published by the Institute for Research on Women. Prior to joining IRW in January 2010, she spent over 8 years working in the nonprofit sector and also taught at Rutgers-Newark, the City University of New York (Baruch College and Queens College), and Columbia University. In addition to serving as Executive Director of IRW, Sarah is affiliate faculty in the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department at Rutgers. She has a Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University and an undergraduate degree from Cambridge University, England.

Sara Perryman is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Women's and Gender Studies Department at Rutgers. Her dissertation seeks to theorize race and sexuality as affective experience in the context of postindustrial Detroit, Michigan. By putting feminist postcolonial scholarship in conversation with recent work in geophilosophy, new materialisms, affect theory, and the posthumanities, she argues that asymmetrical encounters with the earth over time shape urban topographies and actually produce the experience of identity as events. Racial and sexual difference emerge when certain bodies become viscous as they associate with landscapes, objects, music, money, states of mind, and so on. By tracing relational tensions between settler colonialism, territorialization, ‘natural resources,’ and eco-politics, she aims to better understand how technology, ecology, and affect overlap and cross-pollinate in Detroit’s fractious topography.