Elizabeth Porter
Elizabeth Porter is Assistant Professor in the English Department and Coordinator of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program. She researches literary figurations of women in eighteenth-century British fiction and the literary prehistories of feminism, inflected by race, class, among other identities. Her scholarship appears in Digital Defoe, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Pedagogy, and The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation. She was a Visiting Fellow at the Lewis Walpole Library-Yale in 2019, and is a 2025 ACLS Community College Faculty Research Fellow. The working title of her book project is “Feminist Fictions: Plotting Women in the British Long Eighteenth Century.”
Marcella Bencivenni
Marcella Bencivenni is Professor of History in the Behavioral and Social Sciences Department at Hostos Community College and the International Migration Studies M.A. program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research focuses on the histories of immigration, labor, and social movements in the modern United States, with a particular interest in the Italian diaspora. She is the author of Italian Immigrant Radical Culture: The Idealism of the Sovversivi in the United States, 1890-1940 (NYU Press, 2011) and the co-editor of Radical Perspectives on Immigration (Routledge, 2008). She has also published over thirty book chapters, articles, and reviews on topics related to immigration, labor, gender, and class.
Ann Genzale
“Ann Genzale is an Assistant Professor in the English Department and teaches ENG/WGS223: Women in Literature in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program. Her research and teaching interests include contemporary multi-ethnic literature and women’s travel narratives.”
Jerilyn Fisher
I’m proud to have been the very first student at SUNY Binghamton to have earned an undergraduate major in women’s studies. My Ph.D. is also in women’s studies, paired with literary studies. I’ve edited two published books and have written essays in each one: Reading through the Lens of Gender and Analyzing the Different Voice: Feminist Psychological Theory and Literary Texts. Other publications include articles about women writers, such as Black and Latina writers of the 70s, and murderous mothers in Progressive Era short stories by women. In 2010, I was a Fulbright scholar, teaching Gender Studies in Barcelona. I’ve presented my work at many conferences, and most recently, in 2025, I was invited to be the guest speaker at Villanova University, discussing feminist perspectives on fairy tales following a performance of Sondheim’s musical, Into the Woods. At Hostos, I developed the Women’s Studies Program (renamed Women’s and Gender Studies in 2006) and coordinated that program from 2002 until retiring in 2021, after moving out of the area following the pandemic. I continue to teach asynchronously within the WGS program. In my new home, I promote local feminist, anti-racist activism and volunteer with a community outreach organization that helps families needing material support
