Faculty Research

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 she 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.
http://www.csulb.edu/~chinchil/

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 and chapters appear internationally. Griffin is a co-editor of the academic series in Pagan Studies by AltaMira Press, the founding co-coordinator of the Consultation in Pagan Studies with the American Academy of Religion, and on the editorial board of The Pomegranate: An International Journal of Pagan Studies.
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 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 interests include issues of gender and sexuality in the work of Chicana/o and Latina/o writers and the experiences of Mexican women during the California Gold Rush. She is also editing a collection of interviews with and fiction by emerging gay Latino writers. She has published in Frontiers, MELUS, and reference books such Notable American Women, Encyclopedia of Latino Popular Culture, and Latinas in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia. Rojas also sits on the Board of Directors for the National Association of Ethnic Studies.

Dr. Patricia Rozee is a professor of psychology and women’s studies at California State University, Long Beach, California. Her area of expertise is applied social and community psychology. She has published numerous articles in her research specialization, violence against women. Dr. Rozee is best known for her early research on psychogenic blindness among Cambodia refugee women in the United States. She is also co-editor of the award-winning textbook Lectures on the Psychology of Women, now in its fourth edition. Dr. Rozee is also the Director of the Center for Community Engagement where she promotes service learning in the curriculum, civic engagement by students, faculty participation in applied community-based research, and partnerships between the university and community non-profit, educational and governmental organizations.

Shira Tarrant earned her doctorate in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her book When Sex Became Gender explores feminist theory and ideas about the social construction of femininity developed during the post-World War II era (Routledge, 2006). Tarrant’s current research focuses on the relation between men and feminism. Her forthcoming anthology, Men Speak Out: ProFeminist Views on Gender, Sex and Power will be published in November 2007. Other work has appeared in Women’s Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Intercultural Studies, Off Our Backs, the UCLA Historical Journal, and The Women’s Movement Today: An Encyclopedia of Third-Wave Feminism.