Kristen A. Kolenz
Assistant Professor of International Studies
Co-Chair of Gender Studies Program
Offices & Programs
Education
BA: in Philosophy at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio
PhD: in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University.
BIOGRAPHY
Kristen A. Kolenz joined the 911ºÚÁÏ faculty in Fall 2022. She was previously a postdoctoral research associate at the Brown University Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. She earned her PhD in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at The Ohio State University and her BA in philosophy at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio. She is an interdisciplinary scholar of Latin American cultural studies, and her research focuses on grassroots resistance to state violence, mobility and confinement, and the transformative potential of community practices through the lens of decolonial and transnational feminisms.
Kolenz is currently working on her book manuscript, an analysis of the transnational movements and community-building practices of Central Americans subjected to restricted mobility and the ways that ritual activist practices and embodied knowing to give rise to transformation. Using an interdisciplinary approach that combines participant observation, activist practice-as-research, and performance studies, the project refracts theories of racialized and gendered state violence through the lens of queer and feminist organizing to understand the colonial logics that generates separation across time and space. The project’s goal is to document the transformative possibilities that emerge from Central Americans’ everyday practices of coping with loss, distance, and death and to theorize transnational and transtemporal belonging in resistance to white supremacy.
PUBLICATIONS
Kolenz, Kristen A. (2021). A Central American Mestiza Consciousness: Rebeca Lane, Interruptive Choreography, and Rehearsing Change in the Borderlands. Feminist Formations. 38, no. 3. 69-91.
Kolenz, Kristen A. and Jonathan Branfman. (2018). Laughing to Sexual Education: Feminist Pedagogy of Laughter as a Model for Holistic Sex-education Sex Education: Sexuality, Society, and Learning. 1-14.
Kolenz, Kristen A., Krista L. Benson, and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, co-eds. (2017) "Combahee River Collective Statement: A Fortieth Anniversary Retrospective." Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 38, no. 3.164-89.