Graduate Student Research Highlights
Graduate students in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department at Stony Brook University are developing research that builds on traditions of feminist thought and social movements while engaging with current issues. Their work spans areas such as Black and Women of Color feminisms, political thought, disability studies, and transnational feminisms, to name a few. This page features their theses, dissertations, and other academic activities, highlighting how graduate students contribute to the department’s long-standing commitment—dating back to its first courses in 1973—to interdisciplinary research and social change.
PhD Dissertations
- Hafza Girdap, 2025: Contextual Gendered Racialization: Immigrant Women From Turkey in the U.S.
- Melis Umit, 2024: Sex on Screen and the Emergence of the Pornographic Gaze: A Retrospective Reassessment of the 1970s “Turkish Erotic Films” Period.
- Andy Eicher, 2024: Profligate Homosexuals: HIV/AIDS, Personal Responsibility, and Drugs Into Bodies
- Tara Holmes, 2024: "Let’s Not Get Caught, Let’s Keep Going”: Mainstream Cinema and Queer Viewing Practices in the 1990s
- Annu Daftuar, 2024: Global Fertility Markets: Regulation and Reproductive Justice
- Ashley Barry, 2024: In/Sane on Screen: Mad Films and the Psychiatric Gaze
- Valerie Moyer, 2022: Muscles, Testosterone, and Other "Threats" to Women's Sport
- Miranda Saenz, 2022: Dis(Ease) [Sick]: An Examination of the Role of Space in Black and Indigenous Health
- Alex Novitskaya, 2022: New Queer Dissidents: Politics and Geopolitics of Post-Soviet LGBTQ Migration and Asylum
- Shruti Mukherjee, 2022: Living with Militarization: The Politics of Refusal and Loss in Manipur
- Stephanie Bonvissuto, 2022: Making Room for Queer Spatiality: Discursive Designs of All-Gender Spaces
- Yalda Hamidi, 2020: From Female Patriotism to Diasporic Womanhood: Negotiating Diaspora and Feminist Aspirations