Faculty and staff

Farida Abla has a background in Translation and Languages (MFA, B.A., CELTA & TESOL) and a vast experience in teaching ESL. She works on the Diasporas of Lebanese and Iranian women who wrote autobiographies. She deconstructs their works in order to question and analyze the voices of women belonging to the Lebanese and Iranian Diasporas in North America. She also examines transnational feminism, antiracism theories, and the effects of the English language within the Diasporas literature and their portrayal in media, as well as exploring the social, economic, political and religious circumstances these women explored and portrayed in their memoirs.

(5/31/2023)

Dr. Sima Aprahamian holds a doctoral degree in anthropology granted at McGill University. She is currently working on the following projects: A virtual museum of objects that have survived the Armenian Genocide and are in Canada and their stories;  Narratives of Displacement; Ottoman women's movement(s); Her doctoral dissertation (based on fieldwork in the Beka’a valley of Lebanon, funded by SSHRC) was entitled The inhabitants of Haouch Moussa. She has been organizing several panels in academic conferences over the years on literary responses to genocide, feminist perspectives on genocide, as well as publishing and presenting papers on identity issues, gender, genocide.

Research keywords: feminist anthropology; feminist perspectives on genocide; gender/race/class/sexuality; identities; literary criticism

Contact: Sima Aprahamian

(5/31/2023)

Syeda Bukhari is a doctoral candidate at the Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, Simon Fraser University, BC. With an extensive qualitative research experience, she has worked on projects dealing with settlement, integration and socio-economic challenges of immigrants, health challenges for immigrant seniors, issues faced by skilled women immigrants in Canada and so on.

Her PhD thesis “Mapping the Terrain: South Asians and Ethnic Media in BC” explores the South Asian ethnic media’s role, contribution, opportunities and challenges in the lived experiences of their audience. Syeda is also interested in health research concerning immigrants in Canada.

Research keywords: South Asian immigrants; integration and settlement challenges; South Asian ethnic media; health research; qualitative research

Contact: Syeda Bukhari

(5/31/2023)

Dolores Chew, PhD, at the University of Calcutta (History) – Hindu women and property rights in colonial law (Bengal, India); MA, Concordia University (History) – Social reform and women in colonial Bengal; BA, Concordia University (Asian Studies)

Anti-racist feminist engagement inform my teaching, activism and research. Recent work appeared in Andrews, Simi Raj, Anglo-Indian Identity. Past and Present, in India and the Diaspora (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021); DiGeorgio-Lutz, Gosbee, Women and Genocide — an anthology (Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2016); Luther, et al, Resilience and Triumph. Immigrant Women Tell Their Stories. (Second Story, 2015); Canadian Woman Studies Reader, 2015; International Journal of Anglo-Indian Studies 15:1, 2015;  Montreal Serai, 2014; Boyd, The Search for Lasting Peace, Critical Perspectives on Gender-Responsive Human Security (Ashgate, 2014).

Research keywords: women and genocide (Gujarat, India); gender representations and multiraciality (Anglo-Indians – colonial and post-colonial); feminism and intersectionality (Québec and Canada)

Contact: Dolores Chew

(5/31/2023)

Karin Doerr has a PhD in German literature and language which she has taught for 35 years. In addition, she taught German history and culture and spent many years researching the history and language of Germany’s National Socialist period. This led her to Holocaust survivors whose experiences she recorded and analysed. She became interested in the poetic expression of pain and suffering. Further, she investigated historical antisemitism occurring in society, culture and literature. She undertook numerous joint project with historians, sociologists and experts in Jewish studies. I am presently interested in Canadian poetry, particularly by women, and does volunteer work at a senior centre. Her latest research deals with the life of the revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg within a sociological-political context.

Research keywords: The revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg; German Holocaust poetry; Canadian poetry by women; women in senior centres

Contact: Karin Doerr  

(5/31/2023)

Kristin M. Franseen is a FRQSC postdoctoral fellow in history at Concordia. Her research examines gossip, anecdote, and fiction as musicological and biographical sources. She is currently working on early 20th-century music critic and sexologist Edward Prime-Stevenson’s efforts at queer musical canon-building through record collecting and the repetition of queer gossip across literary genres. Her work appears in Music & Letters, 19th-Century Music, and the Cahiers de la Société québécoise de recherche en musique (SQRM), and her monograph Imagining Musical Pasts: The Queer Literary Musicology of Vernon Lee, Rosa Newmarch, and Edward Prime-Stevenson is under contract with Clemson University Press.

Research keywords: feminist and queer musicology, music biography, gossip as historical source, music and fiction

Contact: Kristin Franseen

(5/31/2025)

Dorothy Geller is an independent scholar who works on issues of informal and creative labor, and ad hoc labor conditions produced by industries formed around personality cults. Her analyses are grounded in discussions of women's labor and women's work. She is also a performing and composing storyteller-musician whose performances explore expressions of the internalized security/military state.

Research keywords: women's labor, women's work, storyteller-musician.

Contact: Dorothy Geller

(5/31/2021)

Tamara Amoroso Gonçalves has been part of the feminist movement over 17 years, working with international human rights bodies (UN/OAS), advocacy, strategic litigation and public debates about violence against women and sexual and reproductive rights in Brazil. She hasalso worked for non-profit organizations and for the Brazilian government. She is currently working on her PhD dissertation which focuses on a case of sexist advertisement (Skol Summer Muse Campaign) to discuss the feminist engagement with the Brazilian State and explore how the ideas of a strict separation of public/private spheres operate to structure patriarchal, capitalist and legal relationships both materially and symbolically.

Research keywords: human rights and gender, gender and law, consumer law

Contact: Tamara Amoroso Gonçalves

Shaheen Akhter Munir received her Master of Arts in Political Science and Bachelor of Laws from University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. In “Peacock of My Heart,” Shaheen Munir’s forthcoming debut inter-generational memoir, five generations of women tell their stories set in Bangladesh and Canada prodigiously researched.

Research keywords: colonization, Indian sub-continent, British Raj, Indian independence, Bangladesh liberation war, family ties, cultural identity, family tradition, Muslim practices, middle class and under privileged women, immigration, cultural and educational practices, assimilation.

Contact: Shaheen Munir

Kathleen O'Grady is currently the Managing Editor of EvidenceNetwork.ca, a CIHR-funded project to bridge communication between health policy researchers and journalists. Prior to this, Editor of Network, the magazine on Canadian women’s health. She writes extensively on the relationship between public policy and media, as well as the lived experiences of parenting a child with autism. Academic background in feminist theory and methodology, particularly contemporary Continental philosophy.

Research keywords: Canadian health policy; autism – both as they relate to Canadian girls and women. Also, have written extensively on media as well as the theoretical work of Julia Kristeva.

Contact: Kathleen O'Grady

(5/31/2023)

Haifa Tlili’s doctoral research (Paris Descartes University – Sorbonne, 2008) centered on a comparative analysis of bodily and movement issues among women of Arabic-Muslim culture involved in departments of sport and physical education in France and Tunisia. After a postdoc at the institut, with Pr. Geneviève Rail, she is now working with hijabis women who want to play football games in competition and enabling the sports practice for all women without discrimination in France.

Contact: Haifa Tlili

(5/31/2024)