More than 40 Franklin & Marshall faculty members across 22 academic disciplines have conducted research that incorporates the study of gender or sexuality into their areas of expertise. Here are some recent examples:

Jessica Alexander, English

• Alignments between queer theory and gothic/horror fiction
• Representations of women in popular horror, as well as feminist reclamations of the gothic heroine

Rachel Anderson-Rabern, Theatre

• Female leadership in theatre collectives and ensembles
• Gender representation on and off stage: who does the work, who gets the credit, whose stories do we tell and how?

Dan Ardia, Biology

• Sex differences in the interaction between immune response and color signals in birds and fish
• Sex differences in parental investment in tropical and temperate swallows

Carol Auster, Sociology

• Gender marketing of Disney toys
• Analysis of gender and race in the marketing of Disney theme parks
• Gender and women's work
• Parental expectations as reflected in Mother's and Father's Day cards

Misty Bastian, Anthropology

• Masculinity, femininity and contemporary ghost hunters in the United States

Tim Bechtel, Geosciences 

• The disproportionate effects of climate change on rural women in Bangladesh, Niger and Guinea (with Fatou Keita)

Lynn Matluck Brooks,  Theatre, Dance, and Film

• Cultural representations through dance in antebellum Philadelphia, which includes travesty (cross-dressed/cross-gender) roles in both ballet and minstrelsy

Beatriz Caamaño Alegre, Spanish

• The construction of womanhood in the collections of short novels that proliferated in Spain during the first decades of the 20th century

Monica Cable, Anthropology

• Traditional Dai women's cotton spinning and its relationship with witchcraft. (The Dai are an ethnic minority group in China.)

Alexis Castor, Classics

• How women and men in ancient Greece and Italy used their dress (specifically jewelry) to show different aspects of their identity over their lifetime

Ibby Cizmar, Theatre, Dance, and Film

• Ernie McClintock's productions and acting training (1965 - 2003) as a platform for Black queer and womanist voices during the Black Arts Movement
• Interdisciplinarity of acting theory, politics, theatre, and history, highlighting marginalized storytelling outside the western Aristotelian framework across varying spaces and historical moments

Carol C. Davis, Theatre

• Girl trafficking in Nepal and theatre for social change

Meg Day, English

• Disability poetics and the queered feminist form
• Queer poetics and the queer body
• Deaf women and non-binary poets
• Female masculinity and butch-femme poetics
• Trans readings of historical texts

Dennis Deslippe, American Studies / Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies

• Gendered nature of the workplace and the effect of equal employment opportunity law

Susan Dicklitch-Nelson, Government

• Global barometer of gay rights

Caroline Faulkner, Sociology

• How gender shapes processes of religious exit among the former Amish

Sands Hall, English

• An adaptation of her play, Fair Use, for live radio broadcast; in addition to issues of plagiarism, the play explores the co-opting of a 19th-century female voice by a 20th-century male writer. 

M. Alison Kibler, American Studies / Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies

• Second-wave feminists and television reform in the 1970s

Nina Kollars, Government

• Women in combat roles in the United States
• Shifting gender norms in hacker communities in the United States
• Women in security studies

Kostis Kourelis, Art History

• Feminine agency in the medieval Mediterranean, as seen through the excavation of houses and burials
• American women's colleges and feminist archaeology in 1920s Greece
• Coded homosexuality in the portraits of poet C. P. Cavafy

Giovanna Faleschini Lerner, Italian

• Women's cinema in Italy
• Motherhood in Italian cinema 

Mary Ann Levine, Anthropology

• 18th-century colonial entanglements in the ethnohistory of one intercultural diplomat and interpreter, Madame Montour, and her residence in Otstonwakin, the multinational Native American village

Elizabeth Lonsdorf, Psychology

• Sex differences in chimpanzee development and behavior

Virginia Maksymowicz, Art

• Sculpture featuring caryatids, columns, canephorae, baskets of produce, Corinthian capitals, acanthus, bodies, bones, bread and water. (Caryatids and canephorae are, in many ways, the visual summation of human life and women’s fundamental role in supporting it.)

Stephanie McNulty, Government

• Women and participatory democracy in Peru
• How academics balance work and family in extended travel and fieldwork experiences (with Gretchen Meyers)

Gretchen Meyers, Classics

• Women, craft and cloth in Ancient Italy
• How academics balance work and family in extended travel and fieldwork experiences (with Stephanie McNulty) 

Kirk Miller, Biology

• Pregnancy outcomes in Amish women and other American women

Maria Mitchell, History

• Gendered discourses in postwar Germany concerning responsibility for the Third Reich.

John Modern, Religious Studies

• Devo, masculinity, techno-masochism and Akron in the early 1970s

Jeffrey Podoshen, Business, Organizations & Society

• Gender, conspicuous consumption, and materialism in China

Amelia Rauser, Art History

• Neoclassical culture and fashionable dress in London, Paris and Naples in the late 18th century

Jennifer Redmann, German

• German and Anglo-American girls' literature of the First World War

Leanne Roncolato, Economics

• Gender inequality, development banks and economic growth 
• Unpaid care and household labor in gay and lesbian households (with Mike Martell) 

Ashley Rondini, Sociology

• How Title IX coordinators on college and university campuses engage with institutional approaches to sexual violence

Sofia Ruiz-Alfaro, Spanish

• Lesbian desire in Mexican and Latino popular culture (Frida Kahlo and Chavela Vargas)
• Female masculinity in 20th century Mexican Cinema
• Chicana feminism and political art expressions

Abby Schrader, History

• Gender and prostitution in St. Petersburg
• Marriage and Siberian exile in 19th-Century Russia

Laura Shelton, History

• History of infanticide in Mexico

Amy Singer, Sociology

• Sociological interpretation of "feminist" children's books
• The gendered production of children's literature

Kate Snider '99, Assistant Dean of the College, Dean of Weis College House

• American artist Caroline Peart (early 20th century)

Louise Stevenson, History / American Studies

• Gender and the Pacific slave trade in the mid-19th century
• Perception of Chinese women by American diplomats’ wives in the 1860s

Jim Strick, Science, Technology and Society

• Biologist Wilhelm Reich’s sexual theories

SherAli Tareen, Religious Studies

• Masculinity and the regulation of gender norms, desire and sexuality in modern Indian Muslim reformist discourses

Kathrin Theumer, Spanish

• Gender and textual embodiment in Alma Rubens, the Cuban poet José Manuel Poveda’s (1888-1926) feminine heteronym

Carla Willard, American Studies

• Phillis Wheatley’s poems as the birthplace of African American letters and her identity as the founding mother of black civil rights
• Black independent film on digital platforms, particularly those featuring women’s stories and female writers, directors, and producers

Elspeth Wilson, Government

• The rights and civic status of women and minorities, including sexual minorities, in the United States; with a focus on privacy and equal protection jurisprudence in constitutional law
• The (inegalitarian) politics of the American family

Nicole Jones Young, Business, Organizations and Society

• The rights and civic status of women and minorities, including sexual minorities, in the United States; with a focus on privacy and equal protection jurisprudence in constitutional law