The Ohio State Center for Feminist Research, Education and Engagement (FREE Center) is a hub for community-engaged feminist research and teaching that brings together individuals from across the university and the Columbus community.
Supported by a five-year, $500,000 grant from the Office of Academic Affairs, the center aims to inspire, generate, and support collaborative research and community engagement projects rooted in feminist approaches and perspectives.
Research and Connection Clusters are central to the work of the FREE Center. These clusters bring together faculty, graduate students, and community partners around shared areas of interest related to feminist research, education, and engagement, broadly defined. The FREE Center offers funding each semester to support the work of these clusters.
The FREE Center also hosts a variety of events for the campus and Columbus communities, such as its annual spring panel discussion or lecture and FREE Writes, a writing group for feminist scholars at Ohio State.
Interested in collaborating with the FREE Center? Send us an email at free@osu.edu.
Meet the Team
Guisela Latorre, PhD (she/her)
FREE Center Board Member, Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies
Guisela Latorre is a Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies who specializes in modern and contemporary U.S. Latinx and Latin American art with a special emphasis on Chicana/Latina feminism. She is the author of Democracy on the Wall: Street Art of the Post-Dictatorship Era in Chile (2019) and Walls of Empowerment: Chicana/o Indigenist Murals from California (2008). In addition, she was co-curator and co-author of the exhibition/book ¡Murales Rebeldes! L.A. Chicana/Chicano Murals Under Siege (2017). Her other publications include “The Art of Disruption: Chicana/o Art’s Politicized Strategies for Aesthetic Innovation” in The Routledge Handbook of Chicana/o Studies (2018) and “Indigenous Images of Democracy on City Streets: Native Representations in Contemporary Chilean Graffiti and Muralism” in Street Art of Resistance (2017). She is currently working on an anthology on the arts collective Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo.
Dr. Alison Norris, MD, PhD (she/her)
FREE Center Board Member, WGSS Affiliated Faculty Member, Professor of Epidemiology and Infectious Diseases
Alison Norris is an epidemiologist and a medical doctor who studies sexual and reproductive health with a goal of preventing sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and improving reproductive outcomes for people. She has a particular interest understanding how context (e.g., endemic disease, social norms, demographic factors, and cultural and institutional structures) influences health and disease. Methodologically, she focuses on using innovative methods to obtain high quality data about sensitive and stigmatized topics. Norris is co-Principal Investigator of the Ohio Policy Evaluation Network (OPEN), a multidisciplinary network of scholars who study the impacts of reproductive health related laws on the health and well-being of people in Ohio and surrounding states.
Dr. Mary Thomas, PhD (she/they)
FREE Center Board Member, Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Co-Director of OPEEP
Mary E. Thomas is a Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, a member of the FREE Center Advisory Board, and the co-Director of the Ohio Prison Education Exchange Project.
Trained as a feminist geographer, her work examines how youth in the US come to understand themselves and their identities in and through institutional spaces like schools and detention facilities. Her research shows that while youth must spend vast amounts of time negotiating institutional structures that demand behavioral conformity, they alone shoulder the repercussions when they fail to meet expectations that are grounded in stereotypes, norms, and demands for idealized bodies. Her research foregrounds the emotional and subjective experiences of youth, especially girls, gender nonconforming, and queer youth, as they confront the oppressive social and cultural expectations of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, and embodiment.
Dr. Mytheli Sreenivas, PhD (she/her)
Ex-Officio FREE Center Board Member, Chair and Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies
Mytheli Sreenivas is the Chair and Professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her work centers on the history of modern South Asia, with a focus on women’s and gender history, the history of sexuality and the family, colonialism and nationalism, and the cultural and political economy of reproduction. Broadly speaking, she is fascinated by how certain gendered norms that we often assume are constant and unchanging, such as about family, kinship, reproduction, sexuality, or love, are actually deeply intertwined with historical change in the modern world.
Alyssa Bedrosian (she/her)
Graduate Student Representative to the Board
Alyssa Bedrosian is a fourth-year PhD student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Ohio State. Her interdisciplinary research explores feminist activism in Latin America and the United States. She is currently in the early stages of her dissertation project, which examines twenty-first-century Catholic feminism and abortion rights activism in Mexico, Argentina, and the United States. In addition to her role at the FREE Center, Bedrosian is a 2024-25 Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme Graduate Team Fellow.
Laura Hennigan (she/her)
Program Coordinator
Laura Hennigan is the Program Coordinator for the FREE Center, housed in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. A graduate of The Ohio State University, she has an extensive background in research, communications and connection building.
In this role, Laura supports the FREE Center as it deepens and broadens community engaged scholarship by sustaining collaborative interdisciplinary research and teaching partnerships among core faculty, affiliated faculty, students, and community partners.