Lori Baralt
Lori Baralt received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Michigan State University, with expertise in feminist theory, social movements, and women’s health. She also completed a specialization in Gender, Justice and Environmental Change through the Women and International Development Program.
Her dissertation, “Health Social Movements in a Transnational Context: Racing around the World for a Cure” examined the global expansion of biomedical breast cancer advocacy. In addition to her dissertation research, she has also co-authored an article on the collaborationbetween breast cancer advocates and scientists in the Breast Cancer and Environment Research Centers that have been funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Studies and the National Cancer Institute.
Her work has been published in the 21st Century Handbook of Sociology, Health and Environment: Social Science Perspectives, and Society & Animals: Journal of Human-Animal Studies. She has presented papers to Sociologists for Women in Society, the Society for the Study of Social Problems, the Feminist Research Group at the University of Windsor, the Michigan Women’s Studies Association, and the American Sociological Association.
Currently she is continuing her research on biomedical and environmental breast cancer advocacy as well as collaborating on a project examining the media portrayal of mercury contamination in fish with regard to scientific uncertainty, health, and responsibility.
Elyse Blankey
Elyse Blankley, who holds a joint appointment with the Department of English, received her Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Davis. As a specialist in literary modernism, she has published on 20th-century fiction, literature and film, contemporary poetry, and expatriate women writers in Paris.
Her essays and reviews have appeared in anthologies, journals, reference works, and magazines, such as the NWSA Journal, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Women’s Review of Books, and Albion. She has been a Fulbright Scholar at the Université de Bordeaux III in France, and she has presented widely at scholarly conferences both in the US and abroad.
Elyse is currently a board member of the Long Beach Literary Women Festival of Authors, and is active in the Modernist Studies Association. A portion of her current work on film adaptations of E.M. Forster’s novels has recently been published in Visual Media and the Humanities (U. of Tennessee Press).
Norma Stoltz Chinchilla has a joint appointment in Women's Studies and Sociology. Her recent research focuses on women's movements in Latin America and Central American immigration to Los Angeles. She was Fullbright Fellow to Guatemala in 1965 and received one of two CSULB Distinguished Faculty Scholarly and Creative Achievement awards for 1996-1997.
Her recent book, Seeking Community in a Global City: Guatemalans and Salvadorans in Los Angeles (Temple University Press, 2001), co-authored with Nora Hamilton, Professor of Political Science at University of Southern California, was awarded the 2002 prize for Best Book published in the area of Race/Ethnicity and Foreign Policy/Globalization by the American Political Science Association.
Web site: http://www.csulb.edu/~chinchil/
Wendy Griffin
Wendy Griffin received her Ph.D. at the University of California, Irivne in the interdisciplinary social sciences, with an emphasis on the sociology of sex and gender.
One of the first to publish field work on Goddess Spirituality, she is the editor of Daughters of the Goddess: Studies of Power, Healing and Identity, and is currently working on a book titled Goddessing: Contemporary Women and the Sacred Feminine.
Her articles appear in such journals as Sociology of Religion and Qualitative Sociology, and book chapters are in anthologies published interanationally. Griffin is co-editor of the academic series in Pagan Studies by AltaMira Press, the founding co-coordinator of the Pagan Studies Group in the American Academy of Religion, and on the editorial board of The Pomegranate: An International Journal of Pagan Studies.
Web site: http://www.csulb.edu/~wgriffin
Liz Philipose received her Ph.D. in Political Science from York University, Toronto, with specializations in global politics, feminist theory and contemporary social theory. Her research is on international law, colonial history, gender, race and militarism.
Her work has been published in Hypatia, the International Journal for Semiotics and Law, the International Feminist Journal of Politics, and she has presented papers to the UK Women’s Studies Association, Dublin; the International Studies Association, the Canadian Political Science Association and Women’s Worlds 2005 in Seoul Korea.
She is a member of the Future of Minority Studies project, and has been a member of several women-in-armed-conflict-zones networks, the Association of Women in Development and other global activist-scholar projects. Liz was the recipient of the Ruth Wynn Woodward Chair in Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University in 2005-06.
Jennifer Reed
Jennifer Reed received her PhD in Comparative Culture from UCI. Her dissertation research focused on one-woman shows and the ways they provided alternatives to dominant images of women through representations of race, class, and sexuality. Her research has since focused more on television and representations of gender and sexuality.
She has written on the various personae of Lily Tomlin, Roseanne, and Ellen DeGeneres, postfeminism on television, and is currently at work on representations of female masculinity on The L Word. Her work has appeared in Feminist Media Studies, The Journal of Popular Culture, and the anthology Third Wave Agenda.
She has presented her work at the National Women’s Studies Association, The Popular Culture Association, and the International Studies Association.
Maythee Rojas received her Ph.D. in English from Arizona State University. Her research specializations include Chicana/o & Latina/o literature and Gender and Sexuality Studies.
She is currently completing a manuscript on the uses of the erotic in Chicana literature entitled, Following the Flesh: Embodied Transgressions in Chicana Literature. Her book, Women of Color and Feminism (Seal Press), is scheduled for publication in Fall 2009. Dr. Rojas’s work has appeared in Frontiers, MELUS, Women’s Studies Quarterly and reference books such Notable American Women, Encyclopedia of Latino Popular Culture, and Latinas in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia.
She also sits on the Board of Directors for the National Association of Ethnic Studies (NAES).
Shira Tarrant 
Shira Tarrant earned her doctorate in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Her first book, When Sex Became Gender (Routledge 2006), is about the post-World War II era when supposedly nothing feminist happened (it did!). Her book, Men Speak Out: Views on Gender, Sex, and Power is a provocative collection of first-person essays about masculinity, sexuality, and positive change (Routledge 2008). This one-of-a-kind anthology is hailed for asking sharp questions about negotiating the masculinity trap. Her book, Men and Feminism, will be on the shelves in Spring 2009 (Seal Press).
Tarrant is currently at work on Fashion Talks: Undressing the Power of Style.
Faculty & Staff