Faculty
Professor
Biography
R. Dianne Bartlow is a Professor at California State University, Northridge. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego (2000) in Communication with an emphasis on critical cultural/media studies, gender, race, and discourse, cognition and human interaction. Her research focuses on representations of African-American women in popular music, culture, and film, 19th century Black Feminism, pedagogy and diversity, mothering and violence against women. Bartlow has also worked extensively in television production and is a multiple Emmy Award-winning director/writer/producer. She teaches courses on Women and Violence, Men and Masculinity, and Women and Entertainment as well as general GWS classes including online classes.
Her published work includes "No Throw-away Woman’: Maria W. Stewart as a Forerunner of Black Feminist Thought,” in Black Women's Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds, edited by Kristin Waters and Carol B. Conaway (University of Vermont Press Imprint of University Press of New England, 2007).
She is the author of “African American Women and the Prison Industrial Complex: A Textual Reading of Neema Barnette’s Civil Brand” in the International Journal of Africana Studies (Fall/Winter 2007) and, “Defying Gender Stereotypes and Racial Norms: Naming African-American Women’s Realities in Hip Hop and Neo-Soul Music,” in Message in the Music: Hip Hop, Music and Pedagogy, edited by Terry Kershaw, James B. Stewart and V.P. Franklin (ASLAH Press, 2010). She guest co-edited with Janell Hobson, “Representin’: Women, Hip Hop, and Popular Music,” in a special issue for Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism (2008).
Dr. Bartlow is also the author of “Mocha Moms: Lifting As We Climb” and “Mothers of East Los Angeles: Trailblazers in Environmental Justice,” in The 21st Century Motherhood Movement: Mothers Speak Out on Why We Need to Change the World and How to Do It, edited by Andrea O’Reilly (Demeter Press, 2011),.
She is the author of “Punishing Abused Women: A Retrospective on a Ms. Magazine Blog,” in Illuminating How Identities, Stereotypes and Inequalities Matter through Gender Studies, edited by D. Nicole Farris, Mary Ann Davis and D’Lane R. Compton (Springer, 2014).
Dr. Bartlow’s forthcoming publications include: “Judicial Response to Court Assisted Child Murders,” and she is co-author, with Barry Goldstein, of “Judicial Response to Court Assisted Child Murders. Part II: Solutions and Recommendations” in Domestic Violence, Abuse, and Child Custody (2nd edition), edited by Mo Therese Hannah and Barry Goldstein (Civic Research Institute, 2014). Bartlow is also co-author with Florence Kyomugisha of “Enhancing Diversity through Innovative Pedagogy: Some Challenges and Considerations” (National Social Science Journal, 2014). She is currently developing the documentaries Justice Denied: Mothers Who Lose Custody, and New Agenda: African-American Women and Music.
Assistant Professor and Academic Advisor
Email: tina.beyene@csun.edu
Phone: (818) 677-4475
Office location: JR 340E
Assistant Professor
Email: alyssa.collins@csun.edu
Alyssa's Biography
Alyssa Collins is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at CSUN. She received her PhD from the University of Virginia in 2019 and served as the inaugural Octavia E. Butler Fellow at the Huntington Library from 2021-22. Her research focuses on black life, black feminist thought, embodiment and humanity, and technology as represented in the work of Octavia E. Butler, Nnedi Okorafor, and other black speculative fiction writers.
Assistant Professor
Office location: JR 340
Liliana's Biography
Dr. Liliana C. González holds a Ph.D. in Latin American Literature and Cultures from the University of Arizona, an MA in Hispanic Cultures from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a BA in Spanish and Chicano/a Latino/a Studies from the University of California, Irvine. Her work is at the intersections of Chicanx, Latinx, and Latin American cultural and literary studies. She is currently working on a book project titled, Narcosphere: The Intimate Politics of Narco Culture.
Professor
Email: florence.kyomugisha@csun.edu
Phone: (818) 677-5662
Office location: JR 340M
Florence's Biography
Dr. Florence Kyomugisha is Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at California State University, Northridge
Florence Kyomugisha received her Ph.D. in Urban Studies in 2003 from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Dr. Kyomugisha also received a Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies and an M.A. in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee and a BA in Political Science and Public Administration from Makerere University, Kampala Uganda.
Her research, which she has conducted in the USA and Uganda focuses on families and health issues in women and minority populations. Dr Kyomugisha also worked as an Associate Researcher with the Medical College of Wisconsin (1998-2002) and an Administrative Program Specialist, Equal Opportunity Programs at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee (1991- 1997).
Dr. Kyomugisha teaches courses on Women and Health, Feminist Research Methods, Intersections of Gender, Race, Class and Sexuality, Women, Gender and Global Development and Community Service. She also teaches Women’s Studies General Education Courses (Women as Agents of Change and Women, Work and Family).
Professor
Email: marta.lopez-garza@csun.edu
Phone: (818) 677-4785 or 6488
Office location: JR 121A or JR 340
Marta's Biography
Marta López-Garza (Professor) holds a joint position in Gender & Women’s Studies and Chicana/o Studies Departments at California State University, Northridge. She co-facilitates the formerly incarcerated student organization, Revolutionary Scholars, and is co-founder of Civil Discourse & Social Change, a campus wide initiative combining education with avenues for community involvement and sustained activism. López-Garza is a community based researcher, whose most current research is on formerly incarcerated women, the subject of her documentary “When Will the Punishment End?”. This film follows the women in their journey from prison back to their communities, and their attempts to rebuild their lives and reunite with their families.
Recent publications include:
“Race Classification:The Question of Categorization and Claiming Indigeneity,” co-author Mary Pardo, U.S. Latino Issues (ed. Rodolfo Acuña);
“Formerly Incarcerated Women Speak Out,” Journal of Progressive Human Services";
“Exploring the Intersections between Scholarship and Activism: Our Journey from Community Concerns to Scholarly Work,” Co-authors, Yarma Velázquez Vargasand Mary Pardo, White Washing American Education: The New Culture Wars in Ethnic Studies (eds. Buenavista, Marin, Ratcliff, Sandoval);
“Formerly Incarcerated Women: Stories of Returning Home, to Family and Community,” Research Justice: Methodologies for Change (ed. Andrew Jolivette). Forthcoming:
“Bendición de Casa: Life and Spirit in Living Spaces,” in Prayers and Rituals from the Ancestors and Beyond: Chicana and Latina Spiritual Expressions(eds. Lara Medina, Martha Gonzales).
Professor
Email: sheena.malhotra@csun.edu
Phone: (818) 677-7217
Office location: JR 340C
Website: Sheena's website
Sheena Biography
Sheena Malhotra is a Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies as well as Director for the MA in Humanities Program at California State University, Northridge.
She received her Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico (1999) in Communication Studies with an emphasis on gender, media, and intercultural communication. Her academic research and articles focus on the intersections of gender, media, technology and global culture, with a postcolonial analysis of media in India and the diaspora. Her research interests range from Hindi films and call centers in India to racialized implications of silences and bridgework.
Dr. Malhotra has experience in the Indian film and television industries. Prior to earning her Ph.D. degree, she worked as an Executive Producer and Commissioning Editor of Programs for BiTV (Business India Television), one of the alternative, private television networks in India. She has also worked in the Indian film industry as an Assistant Director to Shekhar Kapur (director of Bandit Queen and Elizabeth). Dr. Malhotra began teaching as an Assistant Professor in the Women's Studies department at CSUN in Fall, 2000. She teaches courses on women and popular culture as well as general GWS classes. Dr. Malhotra often teaches complete or partial online courses for the department.
Dr. Malhotra is presently the Director of Queer Studies (2019-present) and Academic Director of the MA in Humanities Program (2012 to present). She is also the Faculty Lead for the CSUN Collaboration with the American University of Bahrain. In the past, she served as the Associate Dean of the College of Humanities (2017-2019), Special Assistant to the Dean (2016-17) and as the Chair of the Gender and Women's Studies from 2009-2013). She was the Founding Director of the Queer Studies Program (serving from 2008-2012) and has also directed the Women's Resource and Research Center, served as advisor to the Women's Studies Student Association (WSSA) and Violent Acts Grounded (VAG). Dr. Malhotra was the GWS Departmental Advisor for many years (2004-08, 2013-17, and 2019-21) and is the current Advisor for the QS Program (2019 to present). She also served on the Board of Satrang, a community organization that serves the South Asian LGBTQ community in Southern California.
Books
Dr. Malhotra has co-edited an anthology on feminism and silence with Dr. Carrillo Rowe, Silence and Power: Feminist Reflections at the Edges of Sound (2013) (Palgrave MacMillan).
Silence, Feminism, Power: Reflections at the Edges of Sound interrogates the often-unexamined assumption that silence is oppressive, to consider the multiple possibilities silence enables. The equation between voice and power informs feminist theory and activism, creating an imperative that the oppressed must 'come to voice.' Alternately, this volume explores the diverse and complex ways that differently situated groups and individuals deploy power through silence. Authors engage questions like: What forms of resistance and healing do silence make possible? What alliances might be enabled by learning to read silences? Under what conditions is it productive to move between voice and silence? The book is thematically organized to explore: Intersectionality, Privilege, and Alliances; Academia and Knowledge Production; Community, Family, and Intimacy; Memory, Healing, and Power. Essays feature diverse feminist reflections on the nuanced relationship between silence and voice to foreground the creative, healing, meditative, generative and resistive power our silences engender.
She has also co-authored a book with Aimee Carrillo Rowe and Kimberlee Perez entitled Answer The Call: Virtual Migrations in Indian Call Centers (2013, University of Minnesota Press).
Answer The Call asks what the personal and political consequences of being a "virtual American" in India are.
Drawing from interviews with agents, trainers, managers, and CEOs at call centers in Bangalore and Mumbai, Answer the Call shows that workers in call centers are not quite in India or America but rather in a state of “virtual migration.” Encouraged to steep themselves in American culture, the agents come to internalize and perform Americanness for Americans—and each other.
Answer the Call takes on the investigation of call centers in India and uses that case study to help us to theorize, in more supple and nuanced ways, the multiple shifts in consciousness and social imaginaries that contemporary globalizing forces enable.
—Jane Desmond, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Professor
Email: breny.mendoza@csun.edu
Phone: (818) 677-5641
Office location: JR 340
Breny's Biography
Dr. Breny Mendoza is Professor of the Department of Gender and Women's Studies and Academic Lead of the M.A. program in Diverse Community Development Leadership at California State University, Northridge.
She received her Ph.D. from Cornell University in City and Regional Planning with an emphasis on feminist theory and Latin American Studies. Her BA and MA in Political Science were obtained from the Ruprecht-Karl University of Heidelberg and the Free University of Berlin in Germany. Her research is focused in the areas of feminist decolonial theory, political theory, transnational feminism, and Latin American Studies.
Books and articles
Breny Mendoza’s work has appeared in book chapters in the US, Brazil, Spain, Argentina and Colombia and in journals such as Signs, Feminist Studies, Feminist Theory, Women’s Studies Quarterly, feminist@law, Latin American & Caribbean Ethnic Studies- LACES, Tapuya, Journal of World Philosophies and Mesoamerica, Revista Centroamericana de Ciencias Sociales and Istmo. She has published three books: Sintiendose Mujer, Pensandose Feminista (Editorial Guaymuras,1996), a book about the making of the feminist movement in Honduras, Rethinking Latin American Feminisms (LASP, Cornell University, 2000), co-edited with Debra Castillo and Mary Jo Dudley a book based on a conference held at Cornell University in 1999 and the single-authored book Ensayos de Crítica Feminista en Nuestra América. The book was published in October 2014 by Editorial Herder Mexico as the first publication of their new book series on Latin American decolonial feminisms. The book compiles nineteen essays that offer poignant critiques of Latin American feminisms, Western feminist theories, postcolonialism, queer theory, Marxism, theories of empire and the new theories of decoloniality in Latin America.
Her latest articles are:
“La Cuestión del Imperio Español y la Leyenda Negra” In: E-Humanista: Journal of Iberian Studies, College of Letters and Science of the University of California Santa Barbara, United States
"Presentación. Debate sobre la colonialidad y los feminismos descoloniales en los sures globales” With Karina Ochoa Muñoz. Tabula Rasa, 38, 11-23, (2021)
"Latin American Decolonial Feminist Philosophy of Knowledge Production” with Sandra Harding. In: The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Philosophy of Science. New York, Routledge pp. 104-116 (2021).
“Decolonial Theories in Comparison” Journal of World Philosophies Vol. 5 No. 1, Indiana University Press (2020).
"Can the Subaltern save us?" Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society, Volume 1, 2018 - Issue 1
"Colonial Connections" in Feminist Studies Volume 43, Number 3 (2017)
“Coloniality of Gender and Power: From Postcoloniality to Decoloniality” in the Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory in April, 2015,
Forthcoming book: Colonialidad, Género y Democracia, Editorial Akal, 2022.
Courses taught:
- GWS 440 Latin American Feminisms
- GWS 430 Global Sexualities
- GWS 400 Senior Seminar
- GWS 370 Women and Violence
- GWS 350 Gender, Race, Class, and Sexuality
- GWS 340 Women and Global Development
- GWS 305 Women’s Studies Community Service Learning
- GWS 300 Women as Agents of Change
- GWS 301 Feminist Theories
- GWS 100 Introduction to Gender and Women's Studies
Associate Professor and Director of the Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies Program
Email: khanum.shaikh@csun.edu
Phone: (818) 677-7299
Office location: JR 340L
Khanum's Biography
Khanum Shaikh is an Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at California State University, Northridge (CSUN). She currently serves as Director of the Middle East and Islamic Studies program at CSUN. She also co-directs the Civil Discourse and Social Change initiative, a cross-campus and interdisciplinary initiative that foregrounds thinking and action grounded in principles of social justice. She earned her Ph D. in Gender Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2009. Prior to joining CSUN she was a University of California Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and then a Research Fellow at the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas program at San Francisco State University. Her research interests include transnational feminist theories; Islam, gender and religious agency; gender and/in social movements; and race/racialization of North American Muslims. She has published in numerous journals including: Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism; Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies; Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies; Feminist Formations; and Feminist Studies (forthcoming). She has lived most of her life between Los Angeles and Lahore.
Professor Emerita
Email: nayereh.tohidi@csun.edu
Office location: JR 340L
Nayereh's Biography
Nayereh Tohidi is a Professor Emerita and former Chair of Gender & Women’s Studies and the Founding Director of the Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies (2011-2021) at California State University, Northridge. She is also a Research Associate in the Program of Iranian Studies at UCLA coordinating “Bilingual Lecture Series on Iran” since 2003. She received her MA and Ph.D. from the Universities of Tehran and Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. She is also the recipient of several post-doctoral fellowships and research awards, including an NEH grant, a year of Fulbright lectureship and research at the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan; universities of Harvard and Stanford, the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center, and Keddie-Balzan Fellowship at UCLA. Her teaching and research expertise include gender and development; women’s movements and feminism; women and Islam; globalization, ethnicity, and nationalism in the Caucasus and MENA. Her extensive publications include editorship or authorship of three books and numerous articles and interviews in peer-reviewed academic and policy-oriented journals. Some of Tohidi’s articles have been published in different languages, including English, Persian, Turkic, Russian, Spanish, German, Arabic and Japanese. She has served on the editorial boards of academic journals such as the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, the Journal of Azadi Andisheh, and the International Journal of Humanities and Social Development Research. Prof. Tohidi has integrated academic excellence with transnational human/women’s rights activism. She represented women NGOs at the UN-sponsored third and fourth World Conferences on Women in Nairobi and Beijing. She has also served as a consultant for the UN agencies (UNICEF and UNDP) on issues concerning children and women’s status in the Caucasus and Middle East. Dr. Tohidi has also joined the faculty board of Iran Academia of the Institute for Social Sciences since 2015.