October 1, 2016 at 10:30 pm

WGSS Hosts Second Annual Reunion and Roundtables at Homecoming, Oct. 6

Top

This October, the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program hosts its second annual series of homecoming events, including several roundtable discussions led by WGSS alumni.

Program director Dr. Julie White notes that over 80 people attended last year’s roundtable sessions, and the program is hoping for an even higher turnout for this year’s Reunion and Roundtables.

All events will take place in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies offices, 31 S. Court St. The roundtable sessions will begin at 1 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 6, followed by a reception at 4:30 p.m. Come for one roundtable or stay for all of the sessions. RSVP at wgss@ohio.edu.

Part of the goal of the WGSS Reunion and Roundtables, White notes, is to provide a point of contact for students and alumni to meet, discuss leadership strategies, foster mentorships, and ultimately to support and encourage student development.

Ten OHIO alums who graduated from the WGSS program will participate in the three roundtable discussions. The participants range from academics to advocates, from first-year law students to seasoned veterans in a wide variety of fields. The topics for this year’s sessions are:

Gender and Media—1 p.m.
LGBTQ Education and Advocacy—2:05 p.m.
Gender and Law—3:15 p.m.

Gender and Media Roundtable

This roundtable is facilitated by Loran Marsan. Participants include Emily Gilgoff, Jessica Ensley, and Danielle Sarver Coombs. Their respective interests range from reproductive justice to female fans of NFL teams.

Emily Gilgoff

Emily Gilgoff: She graduated from Ohio University in the spring of 2016. There she majored in Communications & Public Advocacy and received a certificate in Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies. Throughout her time at OHIO, she completed an internship in Israel with the English on Stage Theater Company, assisting them in marketing and public relations. She also interned at OHIO’s Hillel, where she employed social media to market for various events throughout the school year. Today Gilgoff works for the Jewish Federation of Cincinnati as its Esther and Maurice Becker Networking and Mentoring Coordinator. In her position, she works to create networking and community engagement opportunities in order to attract and retain Jewish young adults in Cincinnati. In addition to this, there will be outreach to nearby cities to attract young professionals and families to Cincinnati. In each of these endeavors social media serves as an important tool by allowing her to reach large audiences, market her organization to a youthful crowd, and create community events and programs. The forms of social media she mainly utilizes include Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and Facebook. Her position is recognized on each social media platform as #CincyJews.

Jessica Ensley

Jessica Ensley: She graduated from Ohio University in 2015 with a degree in journalism and a certificate in Women’s, Gender & Sexuality studies. She went on to volunteer with the Maine Conservation Corps through AmeriCorps, working to build trails in state parks. Most recently, she was the Campaign Fellow for Reproaction, a direct action reproductive justice organization. In charge of running a mini campaign, she also assisted with administrative duties of a startup nonprofit including writing grant proposals and researching TRAP laws across the country.

Danielle Sarver Coombs

Dr. Danielle Coombs: She is an associate professor and associate director in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Kent State University. She earned a Ph.D. in mass communication and public affairs from Louisiana State University in 2007. She is the author of Last Man Standing: Media, Framing, and the 2012 Republican Primaries (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014) More recently, Coombs and her co-author Anne C. Osborne began to develop a retheorization of fandom, specifically focusing on women fans. Called Performative Sport Fandom (PSF), this work was published in 2013. The authors currently are completing a manuscript examining the performances and experiences of women fans of NFL teams. Grounded in PSF, this work is the result of five years of ethnographic research as well as extensive interviews with women who support a range of NFL teams, including the mighty Cleveland Browns. The book was published in 2015 as part of Routledge’s Sport, Culture, and Society book series.

LGBTQ Education and Advocacy Roundtable

Participating in the LGBTQ Education and Advocacy roundtable are bailiff Amy E. Flowers, Margaux Cowden, who directs OHIO’s Cutler Scholars Program, and advocate Charlie Chadwick. The panel is facilitated by delfin bautista, Director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Center.

Amy Flowers

Amy E. Flowers: She is a bailiff for Judge Kimberly Cocroft of the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas in Columbus, Ohio. A licensed attorney, Flowers grew up in southeast Ohio and attended Ohio University for her Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science (’05) and her Master’s Degree in Public Administration (’08). She attended Capital University in Columbus and received her Juris Doctorate in 2015. While at Ohio University, she was President of the College Democrats, volunteered for Students Defending Students and was an active member of the pre-law fraternity, Phi Alpha Delta. In 2005, Flowers was elected to Athens City Council and was re-elected in 2007. She is currently the Vice President of The Ohio University PRIDE Society – an LGBTA Alumni Association in Columbus and is an active member of the legal community in central Ohio.

Dr. Margaux Cowden

Dr. Margaux Cowden: Cowden (HTC ’01) is Director of the Cutler Scholars program and a lecturer in WGSS. As an undergrad at OHIO, she began her academic career as an Honors Tutorial College in English and WGSS student and her queer feminist career as Senate Women’s Affairs Commissioner, co-founder/president of the Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance, and a member of Swarm of Dykes. She went on to earn a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, with research specializations in transatlantic modernism and queer and feminist studies, from the University of California at Irvine. Before joining the Cutler Scholars program, she was faculty in Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Williams College and, prior to that, LGBT Studies and American Studies at Temple University. Her current research project examines modernist literary engagements with sexual science and human geography, exploring how modernist rewritings of science generate queer frameworks for sexual orientation, pleasure, and reproduction.

Charlie Chadwick: Chadwick is a recent graduate from Ohio University with a degree in Gender and Social Justice. After graduating from Ohio University, Chadwick pursued a career working as the Community Outreach Coordinator for a sexual assault and intimate partner violence agency. Chadwick has been trained in trauma-informed care and commits much time to combating interpersonal and relationship violence and abuse, specifically within LGBT, Latinx, and Indigenous communities. At Athens, Chadwick created the radical social movement F***RapeCulture—a group committed to preventing sexualized violence against all bodies and ending gender-based discrimination in all of its forms—which still has a presence on Ohio University’s campus.

Gender and Law Roundtable

The Gender and Law roundtable features Caroline Nagy, who advocates for affordable homeownership in New York City, as well as University of Michigan law student Bekki Wyss, Liz Herron, who specializes in employee benefits, and Capital University law student Kyle Serrot. The facilitator is Larry Hayman.

Caroline Nagy

Caroline Nagy: Caroline Nagy is the Deputy Director for Policy and Research at the Center for NYC Neighborhoods, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting and preserving affordable homeownership in New York. Her research—on topics ranging from predatory scams targeted at homeowners in foreclosure to the impact of climate change on coastal communities—has been cited in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and she regularly provides expert testimony on a variety of housing and urban policy issues to the New York City Council and State Legislature. She also organizes the Coalition for Affordable Homes, which fights the displacement of New York City’s’ working-class communities. Caroline has also worked on housing and community development policy issues at Citizens’ Committee for Children of New York, the Center for Collaborative Change in Newark, NJ, and the NYU Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. An Athens native, she received a B.A. and M.A. in Political Science from Ohio University, and a J.D. from NYU School of Law. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband, cats, and dog, where she enjoys travel, biking, and gardening.

Elizabeth Herron

Liz Herron: She is an Associate in the Employee Benefits and Executive Compensation practice at Jones Day in Cleveland, Ohio. Her practice focuses on the benefits and compensation related implications of corporate transactions such as private and public company mergers and acquisitions as well as spin-offs and initial public offerings. She has experience advising clients with respect to transaction agreements, preparing equity incentive arrangements, and drafting employment agreements. She volunteers with the Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Association’s 3Rs program and with Cleveland Reads and helps coordinate in-house blood drives with the American Red Cross. Originally from Doylestown, OH, she received a B.A. in Political Science and a certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies from Ohio University and a J.D. from the College of William and Mary School of Law

Rebecca Wyss

Rebecca Wyss: She in her second semester at the University of Michigan School of Law, where she represents clients at the Michigan Unemployment Insurance Clinic and hopes to specialize in refugee and asylum law. In 2015, she graduated from the Ohio University Honors Tutorial College with a degree in English, a minor in history, and a certificate in Law, Justice, and Culture. Her undergraduate thesis, “Troubling Herstories: The Drama of Anne Devlin & Christina Reid,” focused on the work of women playwrights interpreting the Troubles period in Northern Ireland. Wyss was also involved with F***RapeCulture, the Student Union, the Survivor Advocacy Program, and Student Senate during her time at OHIO. Between college and law school, she managed the food pantry at Cabrini Immigrant Services of NYC and lived with the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart in Lower Manhattan.

Kyle Serrot

Kyle Serrot: He is currently a second-year law student at Capital University Law School in Columbus. He received a B.S.S. (Bachelors of Specialized Studies) in Race, Gender, and the Law and a certificate in WGSS from Ohio University in 2015. At Ohio University, Serrot worked in the Women’s Center and was an active member in the Center for Law, Justice, and Culture. During the summer of 2016, he spent his summer in Oakland, CA, working as a law clerk for the National Center for Youth Law. There, he worked on policy analysis and outreach to victims of youth sex trafficking, focusing on the specific vulnerabilities faced by LGBTQ youth and youth of color.