Chair, 2011-13

 

Priya Natarajan, Ph.D., Professor of Astronomy and Physics, WFF Chair

Priyamvada Natarajan is a professor in the Departments of Astronomy and Physics at Yale University. Her research is focused on exotica in the universe - dark matter, dark energy and black holes. Professor Natarajan is noted for her key contributions to two of the most challenging problems in cosmology:  mapping the distribution of dark matter and tracing the growth history of black holes. Recipient of numerous awards and prizes including a Radcliffe Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, she recently was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society. Priya has been active in the work of the Yale Women Faculty Forum since her arrival at Yale. She served on the WFF Steering Committee since 2003 and acted as Co-Chair along with Professor Connie Bagley of the Women Faculty Forum's Sexual Misconduct Working Group from 2009 to 2010. The recommendations of the WFF Report on Sexual Misconduct at Yale have been adopted by the University and have led to the formation of the University Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct that has been in operation since July 1, 2011. email faculty website

 

Past Chairs of the Yale Women Faculty Forum

• Shirley McCarthy, Professor of Diagnostic Radiology and Obstetrics & Gynecology
• Laura Wexler, Professor of American Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

 

Shirley McCarthy, M.D., Professor of Diagnostic Radiology and Obstetrics & Gynecology, WFF Co-Chair 2008-11

Shirley McCarthy joined the Yale School of Medicine faculty in 1984. Her research interests are in the applications and cost effectiveness of magnetic resonance imaging of the body, gynecologic applications of MRI and other imaging techniques, including CT. Previous studies have included prospective evaluations of MRI versus other imaging techniques in the diagnosis and detection of disease and the underlying anatomy and/or physiology accounting for the image appearance. She is a fellow in the International Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, and is considered an international leader in her field. Professor McCarthy completed her undergraduate studies at SUNY, her medical training at Yale and her Ph.D. at Cornell. In 2011, Dr. McCarthy was named one of the Best Doctors in the New York area for the tenth year in a row. e-mail

Laura Wexler, Ph.D., Professor of American Studies and Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, WFF Co-Chair, 2008-11

Laura Wexler is Professor of American Studies, Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Co-Chair of the Women Faculty Forum at Yale. She holds an affiliation with the Film Studies Program, the Program in Ethnicity, Race and Migration, and the Public Humanities Program. She chaired the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program from 2003-2007. In 1999 she founded, and she continues to direct, the Photographic Memory Workshop at Yale. From 2007 to the present she has been a Principal Investigator of the Women, Religion and Globalization Project, supported by a grant from the Henry R. Luce Foundation as well as a grant from the William and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale. Wexler’s scholarship centers upon intersections of race, gender, sexuality and class with film and photography in the United States, from the nineteenth century to the present. Her book, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U. S. Imperialism, won the Joan Kelley Memorial Prize of the American Historical Association for the best book in women’s history and/or feminist theory. She is co-author, with Sandra Matthews, of Pregnant Pictures, and co-editor, with Laura Frost, Amy Hungerford and John MacKay, of Interpretation and the Holocaust. Her most recent publication is: “No Doubt the Cubans!” in A New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors (Harvard University Press, 2009). Currently she is working on a monograph entitled The Awakening of Cultural Memory, using historical photographs as a source of resistance to the politics of white supremacy in the formation of contemporary American reading practices. In addition, she is composing a volume of essays entitled The Look, the Gaze and the Relay Race: Photography and Everyday Memory, exploring of the work of Diane Arbus, Roman Vishniac, Randolf Linsly Simpson, and the F.S.A./O.W.I. photographers, among others. Professor Wexler has served on the Editorial Boards of The Little Magazine, American Quarterly, Genders, and the Yale Journal of Criticism. She is a current Fellow of the Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference at Columbia University, a former Fellow of the Whitney Humanities Center of Yale University, and is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Muriel Gardiner Society for Psychoanalysis and the Humanities, and the Board of Trustees of the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale. Professor Wexler completed her undergraduate studies at Sarah Lawrence College, having also attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she studied photography. She holds M.A., M. Phil., and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University in English and Comparative Literature. Besides Yale University, she has taught at Columbia University, Amherst College, Trinity College, Wesleyan University, and Peking University where, in Fall, 2008, she taught courses on Women’s Studies and on the History of Photography. In July 2011, Professor Wexler was awarded a Start-Up Grant Award in Digital Humanities from the National Endowment for the Humanities. e-mail