SPEAKERS
Alisa Bierria
Associate Director
University of California, Berkeley
Center for Race & Gender
David Frost
Assistant Professor of Population and Family Health
Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health
Octavio R. Gonzalez
Assistant Professor of English
Wellesley College
Emily Rothman
Associate Professor, Community Public Health
Boston University School of Public Health
MODERATORS
Denise Herd
Associate Professor of Behavioral Sciences
Diversity and Health Disparities Cluster
University of California, Berkeley
Russell Robinson
Distinguished Haas Chair in LGBT Equity Professor of Law
Professor, Berkeley Law
SPEAKERS AND MODERATORS
Alisa Bierria
Associate Director
University of California, Berkeley, Center for Race & Gender
Alisa Bierria is the Associate Director of the Center
for Race and Gender at UC Berkeley and a PhD candidate in the Department
of Philosophy at Stanford University. Her dissertation explores the
role of social and political recognition in human agency. She is the
recipient of the Diane J. Middlebrook Prize for Graduate Teaching and
has years of experience writing, teaching, and organizing on issues of
violence and redress. Other research interests include black
existentialism, feminist of color theory, speculative theory of the
body, and popular culture. She is co-editor of Community Accountability: Emerging Movements to Transform Violence, a special issue of Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict, and World Order. Her writing can also be found in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy; Journal of Popular Music Studies; Left Turn Magazine; Shout Out: Women of Color Respond To Violence; What Lies Beneath: Katrina, Race, and the State of the Nation; The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond The Non-Profit Industrial Complex; Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology; Real Change Newspaper; ColorsNW Magazine; and University of Minnesota: Assembling the Pieces.
David Frost
Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health
Dr. David M. Frost, Assistant Professor of Population and Family Health at Columbia University, is a social psychologist who is broadly concerned with close relationships, sexuality, and health. His research focuses on how individuals and couples psychologically experience intimacy within long-term romantic relationships and the resulting implications for their health and relational well-being. He also studies how stigma, prejudice, and discrimination constitute minority stress and, as a result, affect the health and well-being of marginalized individuals. He has combined these two lines of research within recent projects examining same-sex couples’ experiences of stigmatization and the resulting impact on their relational, sexual, and mental health. This work has been recognized by grants and awards from the National Institutes of Health, Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, and the New York Academy of Sciences.
Octavio R. Gonzalez
Assistant Professor of English
Wellesley College
His research focuses on queer studies, HIV/AIDS studies, and transatlantic Modernism. His work on queer studies focuses on the politics of representation of HIV/AIDS and queer subcultures of sexual risk. His most recent publication is drawn from his book manuscript, and is entitled “Isherwood’s Impersonality,” and delves into Christopher Isherwood’s queer ascetic ideal of impersonal relationships as seen in his novel, A Single Man. Octavio’s book Manuscript, “Misfit Minorities: Resisting Uplift in Twentieth-Century Fiction,” develops a theory of the “misfit minority,” a modern sensibility of self-effacement and dispossession found in literary Modernism. This project goes beyond the assimilationist/oppositional binary of minority identity politics. Finally, Octavio is also working on a second poetry manuscript. His first poetry collection, “The Book of Ours,” came out in 2009 from Momotombo Press.
His teaching focuses on varieties of queer world-making, British and American Modernism, and countercultural identity—including outcasts, underdogs, malcontents, and decadents. Octavio has taught classes on “Misfit Modernism,” on contemporary Queer Culture (“The Gay 1990s” and “Queer Modernism”), on American popular culture (“The Cult of the Antihero”), and is developing courses on HIV/AIDS literature and film, and the Harlem Renaissance. He remains interested in incorporating media consumption, analysis, and production (zines, ethnographies, digital writing, e-publishing) in all of his courses, as a way to acknowledge the expansive way “literature” and aesthetics saturate our contemporary world, and go beyond the codex, to the screen.
Octavio is a member of the Modern Language Association, the Modernist Studies Association, and the American Studies Association. This fall he presented a paper on the “libidinal economies of data” at the MLA, and, at the MSA, he presented on the circulation of negative affects within the coteries of the Harlem Renaissance.
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Denise Herd
Associate Professor of Behavioral Sciences
Diversity and Health Disparities Cluster
University of California, Berkeley
Dr. Denise Herd, Associate Dean for Student Affairs for the University of California (UC), Berkeley School of Public Health, was named the 2009 recipient of the Alfred W. Childs Distinguished Service Award. Dr. Herd was honored by the School of Public Health for her contributions as the dean of students and for her leadership on the Executive Committee of the campuswide Berkeley Diversity Research Initiative, which focuses on racial and ethnic diversity and supports research into the nature of multi-cultural societies and the ways in which such societies flourish.
Russell Robinson
Distinguished Haas Chair in LGBT Equity Professor of Law
Professor, Berkeley Law
Russell Robinson is a Professor of Law at Berkeley Law. During the 2014-15 school year, Professor Robinson will be the Samuel Rubin Visiting Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and a Fellow at the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law. Prior to joining UC Berkeley, Robinson was Professor of Law at UCLA. Robinson graduated with honors from Harvard Law School (1998), after receiving his B.A. summa cum laude from Hampton University (1995). Robinson clerked for Judge Dorothy Nelson of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (1998-99) and for Justice Stephen Breyer of the U.S. Supreme Court (2000-01). He has also worked for the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Legal Counsel (1999-2000) and the firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer and Feld in Los Angeles, practicing entertainment law (2001-02).
Robinson’s scholarly and teaching interests include antidiscrimination law, race and sexuality, law and psychology, constitutional law, and media and entertainment law.
Emily Rothman
Associate Professor, Community Public Health
Boston University School of Public Health
Emily F. Rothman is an Associate Professor in the Department of
Community Health Sciences at the Boston University School of Public
Health with a secondary appointments at the BU School of Medicine in the
Department of Pediatrics and the Department of Emergency
Medicine. She is also a visiting scientist at the Harvard Injury
Control Research Center (HICRC). Her current research interests include
violence perpetration and adolescent health. She is currently the PI
on two federal research grants; one is evaluating
the impact of a dating violence perpetration program, the other is
evaluating the impact of a sex trafficking survivor services program.
She also is engaged in research on the etiology of dating violence
victimization, on the impact of pornography on adolescent
dating and sexual behavior, and a transitional housing program. She
has appeared on the Today Show on NBC, and her research has been
featured by NPR, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Newsweek.com, the
Huffington Post, Seventeen magazine, Boston Magazine,
and The Boston Globe among others.