Our Members

Akanksha Mehta, Ph.D. is a lecturer in Gender, Sexuality, and Cultural Studies and the co-director of the Centre for Feminist Research at Goldsmiths, University of London. She taught as a lecturer of global studies at the University of Sussex, along with co-creating a project at Sussex named ‘Mind the BAME Gap’ that focused on providing mentoring and support to students of color in the university. While at Sussex, she also received two consecutive Student-Led Teaching Awards for Outstanding and Innovative Undergraduate Teaching (in 2016-17 and 2017-18). Her research focuses on gender, race, sexuality, and ‘everyday’ politics and violence. She was awarded the Best Dissertation Award by the European International Studies Association in 2017 for their doctoral dissertation, “Right-Wing Sisterhood,” which examined the mobilizations and violence of right-wing women in the Hindu nationalist movement in India and the Israeli Zionist settler project in Palestine. Also an established photographer and filmmaker, she was awarded the Rachel Tanur Memorial Prize for Visual Sociology by the International Sociological Association. She is also on the editorial board for the Journal of Narrative Politics.

Andrea Peto, Ph.D. is a historian and professor at the Department of Gender Studies at Central European University, Vienna, Austria, along with being a research affiliate of the CEU Democracy Institute, Budapest, and a Doctor of Science of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Her work on gender, politics, the Holocaust, and war have been translated into 23 languages across the world. She was awarded the 2018 All European Academies (ALLEA) Madame de Staël Prize for Cultural Values. She also received the 2022 University of Oslo Human Rights award. She is Doctor Honoris Causa of Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden. Her recent publications include The Women of the Arrow Cross Party (Springer 2020), Invisible Hungarian Perpetrators in the Second World War (Palgrave Macmillan 2020) and Forgotten Massacre: Budapest 1944 (DeGruyter 2021). She writes op-ed pieces for many international and national media. She is currently the chair of the History of Second World War in the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, member of the Presidential Committee of Hungarian Academy of Sciences on Female Researcher’s and Life Source and Committee on History of Life Sciences.

Ben Kasstan (MSc, Ph.D.) is a social and medical anthropologist in the Department of Global Health and Development at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. His research examines how the transformative and transgressive possibilities of technology engender multiple, and at times opposing, quests and questions around health protection between minorities and the state. The public health issues he examines include sexual, reproductive and child health. His monograph Making Bodies Kosher: The Politics of Reproduction among Haredi Jews in England (Berghahn 2019) was published open access with Berghahn in their series on Fertility, Reproduction & Sexuality. His work has been published in Social Science & Medicine, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, and Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Gabriela Arguedas-Ramirez, Ph.D. is a bioethicist, associate professor of Bioethics at the School of Philosophy, Universidad de Costa Rica, and Coordinator of the Reproductive Rights Observatory at the Women’s Studies Research Center. She specializes in feminism, bioethics, human rights, and philosophy of medicine. She has conducted and presented research on obstetric violence in Costa Rica on behalf of the alliance between the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL) and the Women’s Studies Research Center (CIEM). Based on this research, CEJIL and CIEM denounced the situation of obstetric violence in Costa Rica, at the InterAmerican Human Rights Commission, in 2015. Her work has been published in several academic journals such as The CRISPR Journal, Development World Bioethics, Annals of Global Health, Journal of Global Ethics, among others. In 2022 her translation into Spanish of the book Doctors who Torture: the Pursue of Justice, by Dr. Steven Miles, was published by the University of Costa Rica Press, as Médicos que torturan: en búsqueda de la justicia. She is a member of the Independent Resource Group on Global Health Justice (IRG-GHJ). Recently, Arguedas-Ramírez and an international group of scholars have won the Discovery Award grant by the Welcome Trust, with a project on solidarity in global health and global health emergencies. Arguedas-Ramírez has also been a consultant on human rights, sexual and reproductive health for the InterAmerican Human Rights Institute for several years.

Faye Ginsburg, Ph.D. is a David B. Kriser Professor of Anthropology at New York University where she is also Director of the Center for Media, Culture and History, Co-Director of the NYU Council for the Study of Disability, and Co-Director of the Center for Religion and Media. She is a prizewinning author and editor of four books, including Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community (UC Press 1989) and Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction (UC Press 1995), co-edited with Prof Rayna Rapp. Her current work, with Rayna Rapp, focuses on cultural innovation and learning disabilities. This has grown from previous research which centered on movements for social transformation, including early work on abortion activists, to her longstanding research on indigenous media. She collaborated for several years with Lawrence Carter Long on the Dis This screening series at NYU, and is on the advisory board of the Reelabilities Film Festival. She is parent to a daughter with the rare degenerative genetic condition, Familial Dysautonomia and is Vice President of the Familial Dysautonomia Foundation.

Katie Gaddini, Ph.D. is a sociologist with the Social Research Institute, University College London’s Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Race and Racialisation. She is also an associate researcher at the University of Johannesburg, Department of Sociology. Gaddini is author of The Struggle to Stay: Why Single Evangelical Women are Leaving the Church (Columbia 2022). Her current research investigates evangelicalism, politics and support for Donald Trump. Her work has also been published in European Journal of Women’s Studies, Journal of Contemporary Religion and Religions.

Manali Desai, Ph.D. is a Professor of Comparative and Historical Sociology at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Newnham College. Her work encompasses the areas of parties and political articulation, social movements, ethnic and  gendered violence, and post-colonial studies. She has published her work in a variety of academic journals including the American Journal of Sociology, Social Science History, and Social Forces. Her current research focuses on a comparative qualitative project titled Gendered Violence and Urban Transformation in India and South Africa.

Marcia Inhorn, Ph.D. is the William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs in the Department of Anthropology and The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University, where she serves as Chair of the Council on Middle East Studies. A medical anthropologist specializing in gender, technology, and reproductive health issues, Inhorn has conducted research on the social impact of infertility and assisted reproductive technologies in the Middle East (Egypt, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates) and Arab America over the past 30 years. She is the author of six books on the subject, including her latest, America’s Arab Refugees: Vulnerability and Health on the Margins (Stanford University Press, 2018). She is also the (co)editor of thirteen books, the founding editor of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (JMEWS), and co-editor of the Berghahn Book series on “Fertility, Reproduction, and Sexuality.” Inhorn is Past-President of the Society for Medical Anthropology, and is co-PI with Prof. Sarah Franklin (University of Cambridge) on a Wellcome Trust grant entitled “Changing (In)Fertilties.” Most recently, she completed a US National Science Foundation funded study of oocyte cryopreservation (egg freezing) for fertility preservation and has a forthcoming book with NYU Press titled Motherhood on Ice: The Mating Gap and Why Women Freeze Their Eggs. 

Marcin Smietana, Ph.D, is an Affiliated Lecturer in the Reproductive Sociology Research Group (ReproSoc) at the University of Cambridge, as well as an Affiliated Researcher in the AFIN-Barcelona research group at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Following his MA from the Jagiellonian University of Kraków and his PhD from the University of Barcelona (both in sociology), he held the posts of Marie Curie research fellow at UC Berkeley (2014-2016) and research associate as well as senior research associate in ReproSoc at Cambridge (2016-2022). As an undergraduate student back in 2004 in his native Poland, he co-organised the first LGBTQ March for Tolerance in Kraków, as well as one of the first academic conferences and an edited book volume on homosexuality (with Dr Beata Kowalska and Prof. Krystyna Slany). Queer politics has also been the topic of his recent work at Cambridge University, within the projects “Queering Authoritarianisms: Conflict, Resistance and Coloniality” and “Global Conversations towards Queer Social Justice” (with Dr Hakan Sandal-Wilson and Dr Natasha Tanna). His ethnographic research has focused on gay men who create families through surrogacy and adoption in the UK, USA and Spain. He co-edited, with Prof. Charis Thompson (UC Berkeley), a volume of Reproductive BioMedicine & Society (Nov. 2018) “Making Families: Transnational Surrogacy, Queer Kinship, and Reproductive Justice”. Currently, Marcin is writing up his ethnography of gay men’s use of surrogacy “Transatlantic Transactions: Gay Men, Surrogacy and Queer Reproductive Justice”.

Maria Dulce F. Natividad, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor and College Secretary at the University of the Phillipines Diliman. She is also the Head of Secretariat for the Tri-College Ph.D. Philippine Studies Program, which unites classes offered by the Asian Center, the College of Arts and Letters, and the College of Social Sciences and Philosophy. Natividad’s research interests include religion and secularism, gender and sexuality, medical anthropology, and globalization. She has published many journal articles and essays, along with the forthcoming book Rethinking Adolescent Sexuality, Reframing Teen Pregnancy: Upholding Sexual Rights and Citizenship of Young People. Her previous education includes a Ph.D. in Sociomedical Sciences and Anthropology from Colombia University. Her thesis, “Reproductive Politics, Religion, and State Governance in the Philippines,” highlights the intersection of religious, reproductive, and state politics. 

Hatice Nilay Erten, Ph.D. is a faculty member in the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Department of Anthropology. Her research interests include Turkey and the Middle East, reproduction, feminist studies of the state, medical anthropology, and healthcare. Erten is developing her first book manuscript, At Least Three Children: Reproduction, Health and Care in “Mother-Friendly” Turkey. She received her Ph.D. from Yale University in the Sociocultural and Medical Division and research support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the American Research Institute in Turkey.

Seda Saluk, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan. Her research interests include Middle East studies, anthropology of reproduction and public health, feminist studies of science, technology, and medicine, and postcolonial and transnational feminism. Saluk is working on a ethnographic book project that explores collective expressions of reproductive (in)justice in Turkey. Her previous education includes a Ph.D. in Anthropology and graduate certificate in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the National Science Foundation, Fulbright-IIE, and the University of Massachusetts fellowships. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Collaborative Anthropologies, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, and Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies.

Sophie Bjork-James, Ph.D. is an assistant professor of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University. Her research interests include evangelicalism, race and racism, white nationalism, hate crimes, and reproductive politics. Bjork-James is the author of The Divine Institution: White Evangelicalism’s Politics of the Family (Rutgers 2021), which was awarded the inaugural Anne Bolin & Gil Herdt Book Prize from the Human Sexuality and Anthropology Interest Group (HSAIG) of the American Anthropological  Association. Her previous education include a Ph.D. in Anthropology at the Graduate Center of City University of New York (CUNY). The work of Bjork-James has appeared on prestigious platforms such as BBC Radio 4’s Today, NPR’s All Things Considered, NBC Nightly News, and the New York Times. Her research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, and the National Science Foundation. 

Sonia Corrêa is an independent researcher who has been involved in reproductive research and advocacy since the 1970s. Beginning in 2002, she co-chaired the Sexuality Policy Watch, which researches and advocates for sexual and reproductive rights across the world. She also worked as a research coordinator at Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), a Southern Hemisphere feminist network. Corrêa worked as a researcher at the Brazilian Institute of Social and Economic Analysis and an associate researcher at the Brazilian Interdisciplinary AIDS Association (ABIA). She co-authored Population and Reproductive Rights: Feminist Perspectives from the South (Zed 1994) and has co-authored other books, including Sexuality, Health and Human Rights (Routledge 2008) with Richard Parker and Rosalind Petchesky, and Development with a Body (Zed 2008) with Andrea Cornwall and Susan Jolly. Corrêa has published and spoken extensively on health, gender and sexuality, and reproductive politics in Brazil and around the world.

Photo by Luis Vera

Soraya Tremayne, Ph.D. is a research affiliate at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology (ISCA) of Oxford University. She is also the co-founding director of Fertility and Reproduction Studies Group (FRSG) at Oxford. Her research interests include kinship, reproduction, gender, ethnicity, and the politics of reproduction in Iran. She is the Founding series editor of the Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality, with Berghahn Books. Tremayne was also previously the director of the Centre for International Gender Studies at the University of Oxford, a lecturer in social anthropology at Tehran University in Iran, and a director of the Ethnographic Museum of Tehran. She was formerly a Vice President of the Royal anthropological Institute (RAI), and the founding chairman of Social Analysis and Anthropology Associates, a consultancy firm. Tremayne has published extensively, as author of Inconceivable Iran: To Reproduce or Not to Reproduce? (Berghahn 2022) and editor of Managing Reproductive Life: Cross-Cultural Themes in Fertility and Sexuality (Berghahn 2001). She also co-edited Women as Sacred Custodians of the Earth?: Women, Spirituality and the Environment (Berghahn 2001); Fatness and the Maternal Body: Women’s Experiences of Corporeality and the Shaping of Social Policy (2011); and Islam and Assisted Reproductive Technologies: Sunni and Shia Perspectives (Berghahn 2012).

Christin Preuss is an undergraduate student at Purdue University, double majoring in Spanish and Brain and Behavioral Science. Their academic interests include reproductive rights and politics, the psychological effects of the climate crisis, gender and sexuality, queer identities in heterosexist societies, and intersectional feminism. Preuss hopes to pursue a Masters degree in Clinical Psychology or Art Therapy, with a focus on the queer experience. Preuss serves as an Undergraduate Research Assistant to Dr. Risa Cromer with the Reproductive Righteousness Project. 

Peyton is an undergraduate student at Purdue University, Indiana, where she studies biological anthropology, forensic sciences, and law and society. Her interests include human evolution with a focus on behavioral ecology as it pertains to violence against people based on religious affiliation. She serves as an Undergraduate Research Assistant to Dr. Risa Cromer with the Reproductive Righteousness Project.  

Macy is an undergraduate student at Purdue University, Indiana, pursuing her bachelor’s degree in Industrial Engineering and minoring in Women Gender and Sexuality Studies. She serves as an Undergraduate Research Assistant to Dr. Risa Cromer with the Reproductive Righteousness Project.

Micki Burdick, MA is a PhD Candidate in Communication Studies and Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa. She studies the rhetorical history of the pro-life movement through ethnographic and archival research, hoping to advance reproductive justice through a serious and nuanced reading of the pro-life movement’s grassroots protests, discourse, and connection to white and Christian nationalism. Their research explores the bodies of white Evangelical women within the pro-life movement, and how they wield and create their bodies and subjectivity to affect other women’s bodily autonomy and subjectivity. Micki is also a program manager in the OBGYN department at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, where she leads qualitative medical studies on maternal mortality and morbidity among Black women and birthing people in Philadelphia. Micki will lead the online syllabus project for the Reproductive Righteousness Project.