Contributor Biographies

Contributor Biographies

Samantha Earley is a third-year undergraduate student at The University of West Florida. She is currently working on a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts in Studio Art. Her passion is in photography. She currently works in Pensacola and plans to move to Asheville, North Carolina, after graduating to continue her education in art and to open her own photography studio/gallery. Her goal is to make art accessible, whether it be owning, making, or learning.

Shawna Guenther, B.Sc. (Hons), M.Sc., M.A., is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Her dissertation examines early modern English medical representations of women’s breasts. She has published several academic articles and book chapters and has presented at many international conferences including the 2017 “Bowie’s Books” at the University of Northampton. She has served as the Secretary of the Graduate Students’ Caucus of ACCUTE and as Academic Vice-President of the Graduate Students’ Association (University of Regina). Under her pen name Jane Arsenault, she has published several creative non-fiction works about depression and motherhood. She is co-editor of Mothering Canada: Interdisciplinary Voices (Demeter, 2010).

Natacha Guyot is a French scholar, author, and public speaker. Her academic background includes two master’s degrees, one from Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle in Film and Media Studies and one from King’s College London in Digital Culture and Technology. She currently studies for her Ph.D. in Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her main fields of research, which influence her fiction projects as well, are storytelling, science fiction, women, and spirituality.

Didi Hock is how she called herself as a kid. She was born in Germany and has lived half of her life in Spain. She completed professional training in conceptual design, holds a B.A. in Sociology, an M.A. in Gender Studies, and diplomas in different fields of Photography. She has worked (and sometimes earned money) as a temp in construction, in offices and at fairs, as a telephone operator, a waitress, a shop assistant, a German and Spanish teacher, a photographer, an event manager, a social and visual educator, a counsellor, an independent researcher, a curator, a journalist, a translator, a self-publisher, a home-producer of ecological detergent, and as an artist. She refuses the idea of expertise and encourages experimentation. She was reborn in spirit in 2016 when she started to work in text and picture on her personal experience with chronic illness, pain, trauma, sexuality, memory, and auto-history.

Maaike Hommes is a graduate student at the University of Amsterdam, enrolled in a Research Master’s in Cultural Analysis. Holding undergraduate degrees in Philosophy and History, she switched to practice an object-centered approach to culture to address a Deleuzian ethics of complexity. In this pursuit, her research interests include the female sexual body, ethics of desire, relationality, and virtual space.

Darlene Johnston is a Ph.D. student at Bowling Green State University. She has a master's in English and a master's in TESOL. Her research interests include the rhetoric of silence, feminist rhetoric, and the rhetoric of political protest. She has taught at the college level for fifteen years. She currently teaches Legal English to lawyers from Afghanistan working on their LL.M. in Democratic Governance and Rule of Law at Ohio Northern University.

Kristin LaFollette is a Ph.D. student in the Rhetoric & Writing program at Bowling Green State University where she just completed a graduate certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She received her B.A. and M.A. in English and creative writing from Indiana University (South Bend). Her interests include creative writing, queer and feminist theories, American Indian studies, and transgenre/digital composing.

Christopher Maye graduated from California State University, Long Beach, with a Bachelor's in English Literature and a minor in music in 2015. His research interests include critical theory, gender studies, and political and ethnic literature, but he primarily focuses on 18th century English and 20th Century American literature. While he is currently pursuing an M.A. in English at CSULB, he works as a substitute teacher, a composition instructor for entering CSULB students, and is one of the managing editors for CSULB’s graduate academic journal Watermark.

Jenna L. O’Connor graduated from MCLA with her B.A. in Sociology, Women's Studies, and English in 2016. From there, she has presented research at a plethora of different conferences, including the American Sociological Association's (ASA) Annual Conference in the Honors Program, the Northeast Popular Culture Association's Annual Conference, and the Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges (COPLAC) Annual Conference. In addition, she is also a graduate student member of the Committee on the Status of Minorities through the Eastern Sociological Society (ESS). As a graduate student in the Gender/Cultural Studies Master's Program at Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts,

her research interests include intersecting and interdisciplinary analyses of gender ambiguity/queer theory/feminist theory, pragmatism, the history and functions of fascism, and how very specific historical analyses of issues surrounding gender/sex/sexuality translate into contemporary, neoliberal times.

Stephen Ohene-Larbi is from Ghana and is a Ph.D. student at Bowling Green State University. He earned his undergraduate degree in communications and two master's degrees (public administration and English with a concentration in ESL) from the University of Toledo. He has taught composition/writing courses at the University of Toledo, Bowling Green State University, and at the American Language Institute. His research interests include ESL, multimodality, and other areas that can help students achieve fluency in writing and speaking.

Diana Pearson holds a B.A. in Women’s Studies from Vancouver Island University in Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada. She is a writer, musician, sex-positive feminist, and holistic nutritionist. She has published non-fiction in The Hampton Institute, Truth-out, Earth Common Journal, and Compass Rose and creative non-fiction in Portal Magazine. She spent one year as a sex columnist for the VIU undergraduate newspaper, The Navigator. Her research interests include feminist analysis of medical literature, critical pedagogy of sexuality, and the politics of sex-positive feminism. In her creative writing, Diana explores existential questions about the role of sexualities in the development of subjectivities.

Felix Reich is a third-year undergraduate from Germany. Having studied in Leipzig, Münster, and at Seton Hall University (NJ), he currently pursues a double major in Political Science and English/American Studies. Before committing himself to academia, he backpacked his way around the world, living for extended periods in Latin America and in the United States. Aside from feminism, his research focuses on power in international relations and the recent refugee crisis in Europe. Apart from that, he works as a student lecturer at Münster University in the area of quantitative research methodology.

Aisling Reidy is currently completing her undergraduate degree at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. She is studying Political Science and Sociology with a focus on queer issues and comparative politics.

Katie Von Wald is a master’s student at Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts, pursuing her degree in Gender and Cultural Studies. She received a B.A. at Boston University in both history and international relations with a minor in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her research interests focus on the intersections among history, feminism, and sexuality including gender performativity, cultural memory, and sexuality and the state.