June 28, 2021

Jennifer Yusin, PhD, from the Department of English and Philosophy, has been appointed to the position of Director of Women’s and Gender Studies, effective Fall 2021, to lead the planning and implementation of a range of initiatives to increase the visibility of the program both inside and outside the university while developing a strategic plan in collaboration with Amelia Hoover Green, PhD, associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion.

Yusin is the recipient of a Ph.D. from Emory University.  She joined Drexel University in 2008 as a specialist in comparative race and empire studies, philosophies of race and gender, global modernisms, LGBTQ+ studies, trans studies, psychoanalytic studies, postcolonial and global anglophone literatures, transatlantic studies and the global south.

Yusin's research uses psychoanalytical theories to investigate trauma, politics and difference in contemporary life. Her first book, The Future Life of Trauma (Fordham UP, 2017), studied how traumatic experiences that happened during the 1947 Partition of British India and which continue to occur in post-genocide Rwanda compel us to transform traditional philosophies of time and subjectivity. She is currently working on a second book called Transformations of Bodies that explores how different notions of “body” function in the politics of race, sexuality and gender.

She has also worked as an editor and co-translator of multiple texts on psychoanalysis, which have been published with international distribution by Hermann Press in Paris, and is co-editor of the Journal of Modern Literature, a quarterly journal in the field of modern and contemporary literature published by Indiana University Press.

Yusin is a talented instructor who teaches a range of courses in the English and Philosophy programs and in the Honors College that explore how we as individual persons and communities understand, constitute and express our different forms of cultural, social and political bodies. Such courses include Postcolonial Queer Studies, Black Trans* Futures and Critical Theories of Race and Gender. Her intersectional approach to both teaching and research make her an ideal leader of the Women's and Gender Studies program—one who will imagine and build connections to other programs and departments in productive ways.

Additionally, Yusin has extensive administrative experience, serving as the Assistant Department Head of the English and Philosophy Department and as Associate Director of the English Program. She will bring the expertise developed in these positions to the Directorship of the Women's and Gender Studies Program.