Current Graduate Students

Monica Brasile
Monica Brasile is a PhD candidate in women’s studies. She has a B.A. in women’s studies with a minor in anthropology from the University of Nebraska-Omaha, and was the first student to graduate from UNO with a women’s studies degree. Her research and teaching interests are in the areas of reproductive justice, pregnancy and birth, midwives and doulas, medical anthropology, histories of medicine, and feminist health activism. She is currently writing a dissertation investigating doula care in the US.

Monica has been a practicing doula and childbirth educator since 1996. She is also a midwifery activist and founding member of Friends of Iowa Midwives, a statewide grassroots advocacy organization working to increase access to midwifery and out-of-hospital birth in Iowa. She has served on the board of directors of the Domestic Violence Intervention Program, and is passionate about merging academic work with community-based activism. She enjoys attending births, knitting, cooking, dancing, music, yoga, and travel. 

Current CV

Natalia Chernyayeva

Natalia Chernyayeva is currently working on her dissertation, “Childcare manuals and the construction of motherhood in 20th-century Russia.” She plans to graduate in Summer 2009. She has been awarded the Ballard/Seashore dissertation year fellowship for the academic year 2008 - 2009.

Current CV

Deirdre Egan

Deirdre Egan is a fifth year graduate student in women's studies with interests in the anthropology of science, medical anthropology, critical race theory and feminist theories of reproduction and mothering.  She received B.Sc in Physical Therapy from University College Dublin, Ireland in 1988, and practiced as a physical therapist in Ireland, Australia, the Middle East, and the US. She returned to study political science at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland and received a B.Sc in Government (Hons) in 1995.  She began her graduate studies in Women's Studies at the University of Iowa in 2003 and studied the effect of discourses of nationalism on the construction of gender and race in Ireland.  Since then she has examined the introduction of IVF services, including embryo freezing, in Ireland, a country in which abortion is still illegal.  She has also written about the 2004 Irish citizenship referendum, and the moral panic triggered by what the government rather extravagantly described as "an influx" of pregnant immigrant "citizen-tourists."  More recently she has turned her attention to the claims made by evolutionary psychologists about sex differences, bringing an anthropological perspective to theories of kinship, differential parental investment and race. An occasional TA for undergraduate Women's Studies courses, she also teaches introductory level rhetoric and works with graduate and undergraduate students at the University of Iowa's Writing Center to make sense of the conventions of academic writing.  She is currently spending a semester in Ireland, studying for her comprehensive exams and doing some preliminary dissertation research. However, in reality most of her time is spent parenting her four children, aged 5-11, which is her excuse for the leisurely pace of her studies and the reason why some of her advisors have recently started to worry that long after retirement they'll still be trying to push her out the university doors.

Sara Holmes

Kats Mendoza

Katharina R. Mendoza is currently working on her dissertation on the narratives of Filipina "comfort women," former sex slaves for the Japanese military during World War II. As a PhD student at the University of Iowa she has studied and taught a variety of subjects from rhetoric, to postcolonial literature, to transnational feminisms, and was a Fellow with the University's Crossing Borders Program (globalization studies). She has a BA in English: Creative Writing from the University of the Philippines ('96), an MA in English from Virginia Tech ('01). Her short fiction and scholarly articles have been published in the Philippines and the U.S., respectively.

Current CV

Lisa Mott

Lisa is a native of Iowa City. After raising her two stepsons, Lisa returned to the University of Iowa, earning a BA with distinction in Interdepartmental Studies and honors in Women's Studies. After completing her BA, Lisa applied to and was accepted into the University of Iowa's Women's Studies PhD Program. 

Lisa's primary interest is women's history, with a focus on Iowa women's history. While working as a Research Assistant for the Iowa Women's Archives, Lisa found herself specializing in the collections of Iowa's African American women.  As a result, Lisa's research and thesis work have focused on a group of African American women in Des Moines during the early decades of the twentieth century. These women advocated for racial, class and gender equality. A few of these women were known both nationally and internationally during their lifetimes but have been all but forgotten. Lisa hopes to retrieve some of their history, restore their place in our consciousness, and excite other historians to do further work rediscovering the stories of Iowa's women.

In competition with her love of reading and research, is Lisa's passion for teaching.  She has taught "Introduction to Women's Studies" and "Gender, Race & Class in the U.S." multiple times. In keeping with her interests in women's history, Lisa has also designed and taught two courses: "Writing Women's History" and "Feminist Consciousness of the 1970s."  She has also designed an African-American History Survey Course. 

While Lisa is not currently in Iowa City, she would be happy to correspond with potential undergraduate and graduate student applicants.

Kristine Newhall

Kris is currently living and doing research in western Massachusetts. Her dissertation is on intersections of feminist activism and sport activism in the U.S. in the 1970s. She is a co-founder and contributor to The Title IX Blog, a resource on Title IX for activists, lawyers, scholars, students, and others interested in gender equity in education. She is a member of a women's oral history collaborative that is currently working on documenting the emergence of a feminist softball league in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts. Other research interests include gender and the space of the gym, intersectional discrimination in sport, and social change and sport. She has an article forthcoming in the Journal of Sport and Social Issues on the discrimination case against a former Penn State women's basketball coach as well as a chapter on feminist pedagogy in the gym in a forthcoming anthology on feminist communities in contemporary gyms and fitness centers.