New PhD Students

The department welcomes our new PhD student cohort.

The department welcomes PhD students Montia Daniels, Tapaswinee Mitra, Jordan Keesler and Rebekah Otto. 

Montia Daniels 

Graduate Student, The Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Montia Daniels (she/her) has recently graduated with Highest Honors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a B.A. in Media and Journalism & Women's and Gender Studies. She's a student of Black feminist theory and is committed to learning more about herself and others, authentically, through research and community work with Black queer women and non-binary folks. Montia's interest in queer studies stems from her own experiences as a Black queer woman in the South, and she is interested in Black queer studies, Black feminist epistemology, religious and spirituality studies, zines, and oral history.

Her honors thesis focused on how Black queer women and non-binary folks' use and creations of zines exhibited Black feminist epistemological practices and presented representation of their communities that counter mainstream media’s erasure of Black queer women and non-binary folks, by providing real and imagined depictions of their lives and experiences. 

Jordan Keesler 

Jordan Keesler holds a B.A. in WGSS from Agnes Scott College and an M.A. in WGSS from Georgia State University. Their research interests lie at the intersection of trans studies, sport and cultural studies, and feminist science studies. When they are not keeping up with academia, you can find them plotting to find their way back home to the mountains.

Tapaswinee Mitra

Graduate Student , The Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Tapaswinee Mitra graduated with a B.A. in History from Jadavpur University, Kolkata in 2019 and an M.A. in Gender Studies from Ambedkar University, Delhi in 2021. Her research interests lie at the intersection of postcolonial South Asia, transnational feminism, race and racialization, and masculinity studies, and she has pursued these interests through interdisciplinary research methods that include oral history and the study of creative practice (poetry) as resistance. Her proposed Ph.D. project explores the relationship between settler colonialism and the rise of religious fundamentalism in the socio-political context of contemporary South Asia.

Rebekah Otto

Rebekah Otto was born and raised in Alaska. She graduated with a Bachelors in English from North Central University (2018), her MA in Critical Ethnic Studies (2022) and received a Graduate Certificate in Women and Gender Studies from DePaul University (2022).  Her research focuses on Black bodily being in northern rural spaces, interrogating how understandings of not only bodies, but the landscapes people come from impacts their ability to survive and/or escape reproductions of violence unique to rural communities.  She enjoys creatively theorizing about "healing," methods of being beyond (and after) violence, and the ways Black survivorhoods engage with cooking, nature, oral storytelling, and communal artistic activities.