WELCOME TO THE NEW MEMBERS OF OUR STAFF!!
Gender Institute Deputy Director
Jo Freudenheim, PhD
SUNY Distinguished Professor; Professor and Chair, Department of Epidemiology and Environmental Health
We are happy to announce the next Deputy Director of the Gender Institute as of July 1, 2021, will be Jo Freudenheim, PhD. Freudenheim is a SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Environmental Health. She received a doctorate degree in nutritional sciences and a master's degree in preventive medicine from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She subsequently came to UB for postdoctoral training in cancer epidemiology and then was appointed to the faculty in the Department of Epidemiology and Environmental Health. Freudenheim is also adjunct professor of oncology at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center and affiliated scientist at the Research Institute on Addictions. Her research focuses on breast cancer epidemiology and prognosis including an examination of breast tumor characteristics, of factors related to disparities in breast cancer among Puerto Rican women, the role of exposures during the life course and breast cancer risk, and the role of the microbiome in cancer risk. Recent work also includes research regarding alterations in lung tissue methylation with use of electronic cigarettes compared to smokers and never smokers.
2021-2022 Gender Institute Graduate Assistant
Surabhi Pant, PhD Candidate, Sociology
Congratulations to Sociology PhD Candidate, Surabhi Pant, as she joins the team at the Gender Institute for the 2021-2022 year.
Pant researches gender and development, environmental sociology, political economy, classical and contemporary theory, and ethnographic methods. She is a qualitative researcher interested in understanding changes in land use and gender relationships resulting from development discourses in India. Pant's dissertation aims at exploring the relationship between broader structural forces like neoliberalism, capitalism, colonialism, and rural women’s connection with their land and biophysical environment in the Northern Himalayan region of India. She is passionate about decolonizing theory and methodologies. In her free time, Surabhi enjoys reading Hindi and Urdu poetry.
New Faculty Publication Highlight
Miriam Thaggert, Associate Professor, English recently co-edited a volume entitled A History of the Harlem Renaissance (University of Iowa Press, 2021).
The Harlem Renaissance was the most influential single movement in African American literary history. The movement laid the groundwork for subsequent African American literature, and had an enormous impact on later black literature world-wide. In its attention to a wide range of genres and forms – from the roman à clef and the bildungsroman, to dance and book illustrations – this book seeks to encapsulate and analyze the eclecticism of Harlem Renaissance cultural expression. It aims to re-frame conventional ideas of the New Negro movement by presenting new readings of well-studied authors, such as Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, alongside analysis of topics, authors, and artists that deserve fuller treatment. An authoritative collection on the major writers and issues of the period, A History of the Harlem Renaissance takes stock of nearly a hundred years of scholarship and considers what the future augurs for the study of 'the New Negro'.
Co-edited with Rachel Farebrother.