Hilary's current research aims to support the development of educational equity and access as a form of racial and economic justice. In addition to a formative research study on the impact and efficacy of higher education in prison programming, Hilary's recent research includes a longitudinal study of reentry and the impact of specific types of programming offered in MyTERN on a person's health and well-being. Along with her research partner Professor of Sociology Jill Weinberg, she has facilitated several student publications of their own work based on their involvement with TUPIT.
Children and media; ethnicity/gender and media; adolescents and media use.
I am currently working on a three-tiered interdisciplinary research project along with Chip Gidney, Mary Casey, and Cynthia Smith at Eliot-Pearson, as well as faculty in several other departments at Tufts. The first piece of this project is a long-running content analysis of children's animated programming. We are updating prior work we've done that investigates images of race, ethnicity and gender in children's animated programming using both content and sociolinguistic analysis. The second part of this research is an exploration of why stereotyping persists in children's media. We are examining this through intensive interviews with content creators, writers, directors, vocal casting directors, and actors. The third part of the project is empirical research we're conducting with children, to see how children make sense of gender, race, and ethnicity in the animated programs they see.
My applied work includes doing many media literacy workshops for parents and for children and for children in a variety of settings, and consulting work with colleagues at WGBH, one of the leading creators of children's educational media. I have written about children and media issues in a variety of academic and popular venues.
My other research is historical in nature. I've written one biography of the relatively unknown mother/daughter team who made Emily Dickinson into one of the most-known women anywhere in the world, and am starting work on a couple of other biographical projects.
Pauline Studies, New Testament, Christian Origins
Divinatory Practices and so-called "Magic"
Gender & Sexuality in Antiquity
Hellenistic Philosophy and Moral Psychology
Apocryphal Acts and the Greek Novels
Saint and Relic Veneration
Constructions of the Afterlife
Translation Theory and New Testament Studies
Theory of Religion
Digital Humanities
African American History and African Diasporic History; African American Intellectual and Political Thought; African American and African Diasporic Literatures; African American and African Diasporic Histories / Literatures of New England
American popular entertainment, musical theatre, women in theatre, the Holocaust/Genocide on stage and screen, voice and speech, stage directing, theatre and social change
French language, teaching writing, instructional uses of technology, the 17th-, 18th-, and early 19th-century French literature, motherhood and female mentoring, Rousseau and the Enlightenment, women's writing, defining genre, publishing history
American literature; postwar movements in U.S.; arts and culture; the Beat generation; feminist theory; studies of 20th century women; intersectionality
Expertise: Musicology; Research interests: 16th and 17th c. Music; the Cultural History of Philosophy; Stoicism and Neostoicism; Tone and Timbre; Mexican Music.
Kathryn A. McCarthy, J45, AG46 Assistant Professor in Women's Studies and Director of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Sex work, migration, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, borders, Mexico, United States
My research focuses upon how the US/Mexico border is both productive of and made legible by socially meaningful forms of difference through categories such as gender, race, and sexuality. My first book, Love in the Drug War: Selling Sex and Finding Jesus on the Mexico-US Border, is based on twelve months of ethnographic research conducted from 2008 to 2009 in the Mexican border city of Reynosa, Tamaulipas during the height of the drug war. My analysis of two groups of migrants – Mexican sex workers and the white American missionaries who seek to love them – reveals how both groups create value through relations of obligation and love. I am in the early stages of two research projects. The first examines gender and sexuality-based activism in Mexico City. The second is about gender and fitness culture in the United States.
Popular Music and Jazz of the United States/Europe, African American Music, Transgender Vocality, Issues of Appropriation, and the Performance of Musical Identity with special attention to race, class, gender, and sexuality.
Families and children in challenging circumstances; parenting and family functioning among diverse families; ethnic-racial socialization processes; cultural and contextual influences; child and youth outcomes; adoption and foster care
I am interested in histories and cultures of medicine, especially as they pertain to gender, kinship, caste, law, and everyday intimacies, with a regional focus on South Asia. I am also interested in the ways knowledge about bodies and minds moves across time and place, and how, in such movements, colonial, anti-colonial, and postcolonial scientific imaginations seed critical genealogies, often counterintuitively. In the diverse ways people make use of medicine and science, I am drawn to the forms of creativity, imagination, and ethical world-making that emerge in the interstices of authority and power. My research has considered childbirth, infant mortality, and birth-work in Uttar Pradesh, India, noting the way reproductive health interventions reiterate caste and the marginalization of Dalit women; women's movement through psychiatric care settings in urban north India and the intersections of kinship dissolutions with crisis and care; and histories of psychiatry and psychoanalysis in South Asia as they pertain to women's lives and gendered diagnoses, notably "hysteria" and its avatars.
