Department Staff
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Expertise: Jewish History, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
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Expertise: American Politics, Political Behavior, Political Socialization, Public Opinion, Women and Politics, Research Methods
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Alix is the Academic Administrator for the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies Program. She has a PhD in American Studies from The College of William & Mary. She has degrees from the School of Oriental and African Studies - University of London; the University of Exeter; and the College of William & Mary specializing in Islam and gender. Her current research focuses on visual culture among millennial Muslim women through political engagement and terror organisations in the United States and United Kingdom.
Undergraduate Department Representatives
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Hailey (she/her) is a senior from New Paltz, NY pursing a double major in Psychology and WGS with a minor in Legal Studies. She is very passionate about changing the culture and pervasiveness of gender based violence and intends to complete an honor thesis in WGS on insidious trauma and micro-aggressions. She spent this past summer interning in Italy for Nessuno Tocchi Caino (Hands Off Cain) working towards the abolition of the death penalty. She currently works at the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center (BARCC) as a Medical Advocate. She was also a research assistant in the Knight Lab on campus, studying sex offenders and the effects of treatment intervention on psychopaths. She is also a co-leader of the Sexual Violence Student Advisory Committee (SVSAC) on campus and has worked for the Feminist Sexual Ethics Project. She plans to attend graduate school in hopes of receiving a joint MSW/JD degree. Outside of Brandeis, she loves the beach, working out, reading, hanging out with her friends and traveling!
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Logan Shanks (she/her) is a junior, triple majoring in AAAS/WGS/English. Through her current art and research project, “Playing in Excess,” she is exploring how Black women express subjectivity and interiority through their aesthetics and bodily capital. Logan’s work enhances the places where Black people spend most of their time and energy by creating authentic spaces for community members to engage with their histories, cultural nuance, and aesthetics through more intentional means. Logan defines herself as a “Black feminist curator” who demystifies traditional “academic” understandings of blackness by pairing Black theoretical knowledge with everyday, familiar encounters of Black culture and art to create spaces where Black ways of knowing are validated and elevated.
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Sanjitha (she/her) is a senior at Brandeis triple majoring in Biology, HSSP, and WGS. She hopes to combine her interests in racial, ethnic, and gender disparities in healthcare in her future work. For the past couple years, she has had the opportunity of working with Professor Gowri Vijayakumar on a sociological research project. Through investigating the effects of both the HIV/ AIDS epidemic and the current COVID-19 pandemic on marginalized populations such as the LGBTQ+ community, transgender people, and sex workers in South Asia, they have worked on multiple book projects, which are being published shortly. Sanjitha’s passion for combating healthcare disparities drive her to go into a future in medicine and help underprivileged communities on a global level.
