The WGS Faculty Council is composed of distinguished professors from across Hostos Community College’s diverse academic departments. It provides interdisciplinary leadership and oversight for the WGS Program, ensuring its curriculum and initiatives reflect a commitment to equity, inclusion, and scholarly excellence. In addition to guiding the program’s academic vision, the Council organizes college-wide events that promote dialogue and engagement around issues of gender, sexuality, and social justice.
Christine Choi
Christine Choi is an Assistant Professor in the English Department. She serves as the Coordinator of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program and as a co-course manager of ENG 110. A specialist in Victorian studies, her research explores noncanonical women novelists and sensation fiction, with a particular focus on feminist analyses of how gender and marriage are represented and contested in the Victorian novel. Her work has been published in Victorian Popular Fictions, Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies, and Victorian Studies.
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
Elizabeth Porter
Elizabeth Porter is Assistant Professor in the English Department and Director of the Writing Center. 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.”
