Don Kulick
Director, 2005 to 2008
Don Kulick directed the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality and the undergraduate Gender and Sexuality Studies Program from 2005 to 2008. His academic degrees are in linguistics and anthropology, and are from the University of Lund and Stockholm University in Sweden. He came to NYU in 2002 and left in 2008 to go to the University of Chicago, where he now works in the Department of Comparative Human Development.
His published work in the field of gender and sexuality studies includes the books Travesti: sex gender and culture among Brazilian transgendered prostitutes, the anthology Queersverige, which means “Queer Sweden”, and Language and Sexuality, co-authored with linguist Deborah Cameron. He is currently writing a grammar and dictionary of a dying, undocumented Papuan language, and will soon be starting an ethnographic project about disability and sexuality.
Carolyn Dinshaw
Director, 1999 to 2005
Founding Director Carolyn Dinshaw came to NYU in the fall of 1999. She had previously taught at UC Berkeley, from 1982 to 1999, where she helped develop the undergraduate interdisciplinary Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender Studies Program. At NYU, she was hired specifically to found the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality; she also directed the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program from 1999 – 2005.
Born and raised in San Jose, California, of an Indian (Parsi) father and a mother from good old Anglo-European stock, she received her A.B. from Bryn Mawr College. She went on to receive her Ph.D. in English Literature from Princeton. Specializing in English medieval literature and culture, she wrote the first full-length feminist book on Chaucer (Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics) and a study of pre- and postmodern sexualities and communities (Getting Medieval), in addition to co-editing The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing. With David M. Halperin, she was founding co-editor of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (1993 – 2005).
Her teaching interests range from Queer Literature (post-Stonewall) and Queer New York, to Ecological Approaches to Medieval Literature. Her current research concerns time and temporality in medieval and post-medieval literature.
