We were glad to welcome new faculty, staff and graduate students into the department during the 2025-2026 academic year!
Faculty
Emily Cornish, Assistant Professor
Emily Cornish is an Assistant Professor of Indigenous art and visual culture in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University. Dr. Cornish’s research focuses on the Indigenous Pacific, particularly Hawaiian women’s art and visual culture and its relationship to Hawaiian sovereignty and self-determination during the Hawaiian Kingdom and early territorial periods Dr. Cornish’s research and teaching interests intersect at the nexus of Indigenous feminisms, art and visual culture, gender studies, and settler colonial studies, exploring how artistic practices engage questions of political resistance, ecological relations, and decolonial futures. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as The Journal of Pacific Arts and the Journal of New Zealand and Pacific Studies. Her essay, “ʻĀina and the Accession Photographs of Queen Kapiʻolani and Queen Liliʻuokalani,” is forthcoming in fall 2026 as part of the edited volume Ecologies of Photography in the American West (Leuven University Press). Dr. Cornish’s work has also appeared in the open educational resource Smarthistory: The Center for Public Art History, a platform dedicated to making art history free and accessible to a broad audience. She is also a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Australian, Canadian, and Aotearoa New Zealand Studies. She is currently working on her first book project , which is a multimedia study of Queen Emma Rooke, Princess Ruth Keʻelikolani, Queen Kapiʻolani, Queen Liliʻuokalani, and Princess Elizabeth Kahanu Kalanianaʻole and their ladies and waiting. The project examines their relationships to the makaʻāinana, as well as questions of sovereignty and power. It also explores how these women challenged U.S. settler colonialism and imperialism from the Hawaiian Kingdom period through the early territorial period. In her free time, Dr. Cornish enjoys reading and watching fantasy series, continuing her hula training under the supervision of Kumu Amy Kuʻuleialoha Stillman, and hanging out with her tuxedo cat Keni.
First year reflections
"My first year went by in a blur of teaching, alongside several key research trips to Samoa and Hawaiʻi, with a recent trip to Hawaiʻi proving especially significant as my first book project began to take shape. This fall, I am excited to teach Gender and Pop Culture for the second time, building on what I learned from the course’s inaugural offering. Transitioning directly from my PhD into an assistant professorship was not without its challenges, but I am deeply grateful to my colleagues in WGSS for their support throughout this transition and am excited for the year ahead."
Staff
Kaitlyn Jones, Education Program Specialist
Kaitlyn serves as the onsite coordinator of the WGSS major program at the Ohio Reformatory for Women, and she works with grants programming and broader impact efforts at Ohio State to create more opportunity for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated students. She brings with her impressive experience across public health and social work, maternal and infant health, community programming with youth, and research administration.
Graduate students
Ian Davies
Home: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Ian is interested in analyzing transmediation, including trans and queer approaches to aesthetics and mediation.
Maggie Miaomiao Deng
Home: Guangzhou, China
Maggie's research interests include Gender-Based Violence, Chinese Feminism, Data Feminism, and Quantitative Feminist research. She is interested in using quantitative methods to examine gender inequality and social justice.
Kieran Duhl
Home: Burton, Ohio
Kieran's research seeks to investigate how the sexual violation against Black people established during Trans-Atlantic slavery and continuing through its afterlives, appear in modern aesthetic culture. Using an afropessimist and critical artistic lens, Kieran analyzes the insidious aesthetic maneuvers that allow these themes and images to become commonplace and enjoyable.
Sawyer Federinko
Home: Dayton, Ohio
Sawyer is interested in exploring transness and the sacred. More specifically, how do trans folks encounter and/or create the sacred, embody it, and re/un/define it? How might trans encounters, creations, embodiments, and re/un/definings of the sacred facilitate unworlding?
Nico Fuentes
Home: Athens, Ohio
Nico's research interests are currently within the realm of feminist crip studies and abolition. More specifically, Nico is curious to explore how Critical Interpreting Studies can be an abolitionist and liberatory practice.
Amika Starr
Home: Reno, Nevada
Amika has two main research areas: firstly, studying the genres of manga and horror through crip and mad studies. And, secondly, examining the histories and cultural productions of Thai American diaspora through asexual theory