简介

Associate Professor Tanya Shields is an associate professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies and recent recipient of the Carolina Women’s Center Faculty Fellowship. Dr. Shields’s first book, Bodies and Bones: Feminist Rehearsal and Imagining Caribbean Belonging (2014) examines the ways in which rehearsing historical events and archetypal characters shapes belonging to the region. Feminist rehearsal helps us explore the ways in which people continually negotiate terms of membership and how these transactions reveal structures of resistance, oppression, and inequality. Dr. Shields is currently at work on her second monograph, “Gendered Labor: Place and Power on Female-Owned Plantations,” a comparative study of women who owned plantations in the Caribbean and U.S. South. Shields hopes that this work will not only excavate this seldom studied group, but will also provide insights into women and work in our contemporary period. Additionally, her work is published in Cultural Dynamics, Women, Gender and Families of Color, and Identities. Dr. Shields teaches classes on Caribbean women, the arts of activism, growing up girl globally, and the continuing influence of plantation economics and politics. She is a board member of the Association for Women Faculty and Professionals (AWFP) and a board member for the Maryland-based Carivision Community Theater, which seeks to use theater as space of exchange between Caribbean and U.S. theater audiences.