CSSC People

People

Director

Daniel Boyarin is the director of the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture. He is the Hermann P. and Sophia Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture in the Departments of Near Eastern Studies and Rhetoric, an affiliated member of the Gender and Women's Studies Department, and a core faculty member for the LGBT Minor, the graduate groups in Jewish Studies, Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology, and the designated emphasis in Women, Sexuality, and Gender Studies. Professor Boyarin is the author of Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture and Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man, and is co-editor of Queer Theory and the Jewish Question.

Advisory Board

Paola Bacchetta is Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at University of California at Berkeley. She is also Director of Beatrice Bain Research Group (BBRG), the UC Berkeley research center for gender, sexuality and race. Her geographic areas of specialization outside the U.S. are India and France.

Professor Bacchetta is author of Gender in the Hindu Nation: RSS Women as Ideologists (New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2003), and co-editor of Right-Wing Women: From Conservatives to Extremists around the World (New York: Routledge, 2002). She has published articles on gender, sexuality, Hindu nationalism, political conflict, "race"-racism, postcoloniality, and feminist and queer movements, in journals such as Social Text; Feminist Studies; Journal of Women's History; Antipode: A Journal of Radical Geography; Growth and Change; Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism. She has also published chapters in edited books on global political conflict, Hindu nationalism, and feminist and queer movements in India.

Michael Lucey is a professor of French and Comparative Literature, and is currently Chair of the Department of French. He was the founding director of the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture, relinquishing his duties in 2004 to Daniel Boyarin. He continues to serve on the CSSC's Advisory Board.

Professor Lucey teaches widely in the fields of critical and social theory, sexuality studies, and the literature and culture of nineteenth- and twentieth-century France, Europe, and the U.S. He also has a strong interest in the study of music. He is the author of three books: Gide's Bent: Sexuality, Politics, Writing (Oxford, 1995), The Misfit of the Family: Balzac and the Social Forms of Sexuality (Duke, 2003), and Never Say I: Sexuality and the First Person in Colette, Gide, and Proust (Duke, 2006). "Simone de Beauvoir and Sexuality in the Third Person," an essay drawn from his current book project, is forthcoming in Representations.

Charis Thompson is Associate Professor of Gender & Women's Studies, and the Co-Director of the Science, Technology, and Society Center at UC Berkeley. She read Philosophy, Psychology, and Physiology at Oxford University, and got her Ph.D. from the Science Studies program at UC San Diego. Before coming to Berkeley, she taught in the Science and Technology Studies Department at Cornell University, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and in the History of Science Department at Harvard University. She is the author of Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies (MIT Press, 2005), which won the 2007 Rachel Carson Award from the Society for the Social Study of Science. She currently writing a book entitled Good Science.

Linda Williams is the Chair of the CSSC Advisory Board. She is professor of Film Studies and Rhetoric at U.C. Berkeley. Professor Williams' edited books include Re-vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism (1984), Viewing Positions (Rutgers, 1993) Reinventing Film Studies (with Christine Gledhill, Arnold, 2000) and Porn Studies, (Duke U.P., 2004). In 1989 she published Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the "Frenzy of the Visible" (second edition 1999) and in 2001 Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White, from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson (2001, Princeton). Her most recent book is Screening Sex (2008, Duke).