WGSS Alumni Are Leaders in Their Fields
Let us know what you're up to by filling out our Alumni Bio form!
-
Jena Self Garrett
2021 graduate certificate
Jena took a huge leap of faith after completing her WGSS Certificate. She opened her own business in downtown Bloomington, The Energy Hut (200 W. Monroe St, Ste 104 - inside Fox and Hounds salon building) serves herbal tea and protein shakes! She tells us that she uses her feminist toolkit to continue navigating life, relationships, and interactions with individuals each day!
-
Loretta Addo-Danso
2021 graduate certificate
As a current legal advocate for survivors, she has been able to apply the theories and lessons gained from WGSS in her work with survivors! She will also be starting her PhD in Criminology at the University of Delaware this fall. Loretta looka forward to conducting more research on gender based violence, feminism and intesectionality theory in hopes that her studies helps shape policy making and implementation in the country and worldwide.
-
Paige Rogge
2021 graduate certificate
Paige completed her MSW internship at Gateway Family Services of Illinois and was hired as a clinical therapist specializing in the treatment of women and youth with complex developmental trauma. Her therapy clients include a handful of inspiring LGBTQ+ teens who continue to teach her about the beauty of our diverse humanity. She uses Trauma-Focused Equine Assisted Psychotherapy, as well as other neuroscience-based therapies, to help clients process and cope with traumatic stress. She credits the WGSS program graduate certificate for her unique insight into the sturggles her clients face and her ability to make an impact in her corner of the world.
-
Radiance Campbell
2019 Minor
Recently completed her first year at Georgetown Law and began her position as a Lane Evans Home Court Fellow at the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless. She is thrilled to continue working on issues of housing justice and becoming a part of the legal and organizing community Washington, D.C.! She is a Blume Public Interest Scholar.
-
Xan Daggett
2019 Minor; 2024 Graduate Certificate
After graduating from ISU in 2019, Xan taught ELA for three years at Eisenhower High School in Decatur, IL. They were a founding member of Decatur Public Schools' LGBTQ committee, and in the spring of 2022 won sponsor of the year for their efforts with Eisenhower's Gay-Straight Alliance. Realizing they enjoyed working to support marginalized students more directly, Xan returned to ISU in the fall of 2022, where they served as the Graduate Assistant for the WGSS Program, a member-at-large for ISU Queer Coalition, and a volunteer facilitator for McLean County's LGBTQIA2+ youth group, Over the Rainbow. Xan received an Acorn Equality Scholarship in December 2022 for their continued research and advocacy within the queer and trans community. In May of 2024, Xan graduated with an MS in English and graduate certificate in WGSS, and also earned a Fisher Thesis Award at the college level for their master's thesis, "Digital Safe Spaces: Nonbinary Community Building on TikTok". Xan is currently the Assistant Director of the Office of Diversity & Inclusion at Illinois Wesleyan University.
-
Chloe Ogasawara (Kasper)
2018 Minor
Chloe says that since her graduation in 2018, she has gained professional communications experiences in agency, nonprofit, and corporate communications. In June, she will be celebrating her second work anniversary at Ace Hardware as Business Communications Specialist. In her current role, she specializes in crafting and aligning internal communications practices and initiatives with business objectives for corporate business partners. In the past year, she's led the development and implementation of a multifaceted communications plan for Ace’s Supply Chain, which includes 15 retail support centers across the nation. On a personal note, in January of this year, she got married to her husband, Eric, and has been enjoying married life ever since. Her WGSS experience at ISU has greatly influenced her professional and personal life post-graduation. In 2020, she joined the Association for Women in Communications (AWC). During her membership, she led the AWC Book Club, which included members from a variety of local chapters across the nation. In this role, she curated their reading list to include a variety of genres and a diverse range of authors that fueled discussions around topics including women’s history, relationships, and gender inequalities in the workforce. During this time, she was also awarded AWC's Advancement Fund Grant to attend the 2022 AWC National Conference, "Versatility: Elevating Your Voice in Changing Times." Since the National Chapter dissolved in 2023, she has continued to engage with WGSS-focused literature and media, always looking for ways to further inform and improve her communications work, with a particular focus on inclusive language and information accessibility.
-
Misia Grzybowski
2018 graduate certificate
After graduating with her WGSS Certificate and a Masters' in Psychology and College Student Personnell Misia took a job as Senior Specialist for Peer Education and Advocacy in the Health Promotion and Wellness Office. She advises and supports to incredible student groups: Student Ending Rape Culture (SERC) and the Student Wellness Ambassador Team (SWAT). "I so often find myself returning to the books, theories, and lessons we learned in our WGSS classes and weave them in throughout the educational opportunities I help create for my students."
-
Kaitlyn Tossie
2017 graduate certificate
Kaitlyn Tossie (MS '17) is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Kansas. She has also recently been appointed as Managing Editor of the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. Her dissertation explores how American playwrights remember and memorialize twenty-first century American traumas such as 9/11, the war on terror, and the Sandy Hook shooting. She expects to graduate in Spring 2022.
-
Venise Keys
2016 graduate certificate
Venise was accepted to the Wild Yams: Black Mothers Artist Residency for 2022. This innovative studio collaboration designed to support, uplift, and encourage sustainability and arts equity for Black Mothers and caretakers on Chicago's south side.
-
Emily Johnston
2016 graduate certificate
Emily Johnston (PhD '16) is the Associate Director of the Dimensions of Culture Writing Program at the University of San Diego, where she is also a lecturer. She has received two teaching awards. She was nominated for both the Outstanding Faculty Teaching Award and recently awarded the Outstanding Faculty Award (2021). Her co-authored study on teaching empathy in first-year writing courses was accepted for publication by College Composition & Communication.
-
Kevin Mell
2016 minor
Started his first year in the DePaul University College of Law, where he is a student member of the National Lawyers Guild. He is also a trained Legal Observer who monitors police conduct during organized actions and ensures that activists who are arrested during a protest are given access to a pro bono attorney.
-
Fabiola Rosiles-Duran
2016 minor
Fabiola went on to receive her Master of Arts in Women and Gender Studies at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois. While at DePaul, she published her thesis titled, "The Telling is Political & Intentional: Resistance Through Testimonio for Latinas in Higher Education." She then went on to pursue her doctoral studies at Loyola University Chicago (Class of 2024)in the Higher Education program and will be publishing her dissertation titled "'If They Can Help, They Will': A Community Cultural Wealth Approach On Parent Support And Its Influence On The College Success Of First-Generation Latinas." She is currently working as a Program Supervisor for the Working on Womanhood Program, has been a continuous awardee of the Paul T. & Concetta Mooney Fellowship Scholarship Award at Loyola, and named an alumni honoree in the DePaul University Chicago Changemakers Honor Roll. Her WGSS experience at ISU encouraged her to question, challenge, and seek new ways of learning and shed light on topics and communities that have and continue to do amazing work in their communities.
-
Brooke Barnhart
2015 minor
Completed her first year in the Gender and Women's Studies Master's Program at University of Wisconsin - Madison.
Served as a teaching assistant for both Introduction to LGBTQ Studies and the Introduction to WGS course.
-
Emma Belz
2015 minor
Emma is pursuing her Master's degree in College Personnel Administration at Illinois State University and is currently working as a graduate assistant in Heartland Community College's Office of Engagement. She is an intern in Health Promotion and Wellness working on survivor support services and violence prevention education. She also volunteers with Stepping Stones.
-
Malia Haanio
2015 minor
Recently returned from China where she taught kindergarten and 1st grade English language.
Accepted a position in a domestic violence and sexual assault prevention organization in Denver, Colorado.
-
Matt Rillie
2015 minor
Matthew currently works in diversity and inclusion at Columbia College Chicago, doing identity work, facilitation, and curriculum building for creative art students and loves it. He is currently pursuing a Doctoral Degree in Higher Education. From teaching Diversity and Inclusion focused workshops and classes, to sitting with a young person who is putting language to their identities in the world for the first time, he is honored to do his work. To this day he says his WGS education at Illinois State University has been the foundation of his work, and he attests so much of his critical thinking and intentional work to his time in the Program.
-
Flourice Richardson
2015 graduate certificate
Flourice recently accepted an assistant professor position at Winston-Salem State University in Winston-Salem, NC. She will be assisting in the development of a technical writing program.
-
Tomas Bolivar
2014 minor
Admissions Counselor at Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine. He uses his WGSS knowledge every day to craft diversity initiatives for a new recruitment protocol.
Recently accepted into the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Master's Program at Loyola.
-
Erin Frost
2013 graduate certificate
Erin Frost, (PhD '13; MA '09) is an associate professor of English at East Carolina University. She recently co-edited (with Michelle Eble), a collection of article titled Interrogating Gendered Pathologies (Utah State University Press, 2020). The collection uses a range of complementary and intersectional theoretical approaches, to examine rhetoric's role in healthcare, how it differs depending on patient embodiment and the ways nonnormative bodies are pathologized.
-
Tyler R Flockhart
2012 graduate certificate
Tyler R Flockhart (MS '12) credits his love of sociology to his time as ISU and the courses he took with Dr. Gerschick. He is currently an assistant professor of sociology at Viterbo University where he teaches a range of courses on family, sex and gender, race and ethnicity, juvenile justice, research methods, and institutional inequalities. His research interests include the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL), racially conservative and extremist groups, inequalities in parent-LGBTQ child relationships, and homophobia and heterosexism in popular television shows.
-
Kelly Smith
2012 graduate certificate
Kelly has been a Faculty Director and college instructor for the past ten years. She recently joined the Learning Engineers Group in the Division of Continuing Studies at the University of Wisconsin - Madison where she consults with content experts, instructors, and administration to design engaging course for students. She and her husband are busy raising their two kids. You can still find her training for races, and outside of the stadium during tailgate season.
-
Gina Stinnett
2016 minor, 2018 graduate certificate
Gina is in her 6th year of the Composition and Cultural Rhetoric's PhD program at Syracuse University, and is currently writing her dissertation. Her work focuses on how Neoliberalism impacts both policy rhetoric and cultural rhetoric around the Opioid Epidemic in America. In it she argues that in addition to an economic and cultural structure, Neoliberalism is a rhetorical structure—it shapes our society specifically through how we talk about ourselves and each other. When she's not working on academic things, she does community outreach with various harm reduction organizations in Syracuse and Chicago. In WGSS, she learned how to both think and organize more effectively. The WGSS classes she took at ISU gave her the tools to connect social issues to different historical, cultural, and political contexts. In addition to the theoretical toolbox she developed, she was able to gain experience with on-the-ground activism. She uses these skills daily in both her academic work and outreach work (or sometimes both at the same time, like when organizing Narcan trainings on campus!).
-
Erica Thurman
2009 minor
Writes and manages grants and contracts with the National Partnership for Women and Families, in Washington, D.C.
Has had six book chapters accepted for publication in a three-book series on race and American television.
Blogs at Life Behind the Veil.
-
Jenna Goldsmith
2008 minor, 2010 graduate certificate, 2020 Outstanding Young Alumni Award Winner
Jenna is the current City of Rockford Poet Laureate. She recently returned to a position at Oregon State University Cascades in a remote capacity to serve as Program Director for the Low-residency MFA Program in Creative Writing. Her first full-length book of poetry is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press, the teaching press of the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point. She resides in Rockford, Illinois. Her WGSS experience at ISU is infused in everything she does, from her writing and teaching, to her activism and advocacy work. Her training in women's history, especially, is critical to the feminism she practices in her professional and personal life.
-
Katelyn Wood
2007 minor
Katelyn Hale Wood (BA '07) is an assistant professor in theater history and performance at the University of Virginia. She has a new book Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Century United States. It was release in June and they tells us: 'It's been a joy to finally see the book out in the world!'
-
Andrew Anastasia
2006 minor
Andrew was granted tenure and promoted to Associate Professor of English at Harper College. He was a member of the 2019-2020 Social Justice Leadership Cohort at Harper and completed his final project on developing equity-based, trauma-informed curricular infusions for faculty to implement across campus. Recent conference presentations and invited talks have included creating trauma-informed composition classrooms and working with white, heterosexual, cisgender fragility in the classroom through understanding psychosomatic responses to discomfort and cognitive dissonance.
-
Sarah Ehlers
2004 minor
Sarah Ehlers (BA '04) is an associate professor in the English Department at the University of Houston. She is the author of Left of Poetry Depression American and the Formation of Modern Poetics (2019) reports that she has spent the past year adjusting to online teaching. She recently began her term as the director of Graduate Studies in the English department at UH.
-
Jody L Herman
1999 graduate certificate
Jody L. Herman (BA '99) was recently promoted to Senior Scholar of Public Policy at the Williams Institute, a research center at the UCLA School of Law focused on sexual orientation and gender identity law and public policy. Her work focuses on the prevalence and impact of discrimination against transgender people. She's currently serving as co-principal investigator on the 2022 U.S. Transgender Survey and is working on several papers examining the relationship between mental health indicators and access to gender-affirming care for trans adults. She is also working on updated estimates on the size and demographic characteristics of the U.S. trans population and two NIH-funded studies that seek to improve sexual orientation and gender identity mortality data and the health and experiences of nonbinary youth. Based in Los Angeles, she splits her time between LA and Peoria, IL, where she grew up.