Date: April 18, 2012
Time: 3-5 p.m.
Speakers: Holly Karibo, Amy Gullage, Vasuki Shanmuganathan, and Laura J. Kwak
Location: Wilson Hall, Rm 2053
Holly Karibo is a 5th year doctoral candidate in the Graduate Collaborative Program in History and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation, “Ambassadors of Pleasure: Illicit Economies in the Detroit-Windsor Borderland, 1945-1960,” examines the history of prostitution and heroin economies along the Canada-US border in the mid-twentieth century. She has published work in several journals, including American Review of Canadian Studies and Social History of Alcohol and Drugs. Holly has also received a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Comparative Border Studies Institute at Arizona State University, which she will begin in the Summer of 2012.
Amy Gullage is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning and the Graduate Collaborative Program in Women and Gender Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto. In addition to her interest in representations of bodies in popular culture, her research examines how discourses of the body, such fitness and fatness, are manifested in educational institutions. Her current work explores how teachers understand and use these discourses in their teaching practices.
Vasuki Shanmuganathan is a PhD candidate in the Collaborative Program in German Studies and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on the intersections of race, colonialism and children in the German and Austro-Hungarian Empire. She is particularly interested in constructions of racialized, animalized and infantalized bodies in literature and culture, representations of colonial children, and imperial German business networks in colonial South Asia. Her research has won several national, provincial and university awards. She has taught in various capacities in German Studies, History and Women’s Studies departments.
Laura J. Kwak is currently a PhD candidate in the department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education (SESE) at the University of Toronto. From 2006-2007 she served as the Korean Students Association of Canada (KSAC)’s first 2nd-generation female President. Her experiences in community and anti-oppressive organizing led her to explore representations of race, masculinity, and violence in a case study of the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings for her MA thesis. Laura’s current project looks at the emergence of racial conservatism in Canada and the United States, charting how Asian Canadian and Asian American political figures are embedded in shifting theories of racial formation.
Click here for more information about the Women and Gender Studies Research Seminar.