Cierra Olivia Thomas-Williams

cthomasw@indiana.edu
Admitted: 2006
(Combined PhD with American Studies)
Minor: African American and
African Diaspora Studies

BA 2005 - Eastern Oregon University
Major(s) - Anthropology and Sociology
Minor(s): Gender Studies

Cierra Olivia Thomas-Williams is a member of the Miwok of the El Dorado Rancheria and is a single mother of twin six-year-old girls who joined the inaugural class of the nation's first Gender Studies Ph.D. program at Indiana University Bloomington in 2006 as the Indiana University Diversity Scholar.   In 2008, Cierra was admitted to the American Studies PhD program and is working toward a combined PhD in Gender Studies and American Studies.   She has recently been awarded IU's 2009-10 John H. Edwards fellow for "good citizenship, character, and especially attitude toward public service and the likelihood of future usefulness to society, scholastic ability, intellectual capacity."

Ms. Thomas-Williams' courses taught include G104 Representations of Black Women in Popular Culture and in Spring and Summer 2008 G101 Gender, Culture, and Society. Cierra has contributed to the academic journals Callaloo, 'emisferica, and to On Campus with Women, a publication of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, in a special issue entitled Visibility and Invisibility: LGBTQ Students on Campus. Ms. Thomas-Williams is one of the 2007 Friends of the Kinsey Institute grant recipients for collaborative research on sexuality with Dr. Lessie Jo Frazier for their research on sexual citizenship in Cosmopolitan Magazine.

representations of women of color in media; critical race and feminist theories; and transnational feminisms as they intersect with theories of the Black Diaspora.  

Courses:

G104 Representations of Black Women in Popular Culture
G101 Gender, Culture, and Society

Book/Film Reviews:

• “Book Review: Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness,” an edited collection by Kamari Maxine Clarke and Deborah A. Thomas,” Callaloo, Vol. 32 No.2, 2009, p. 679-72.

• “Book Review: Mammy: a Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory,” by Kimberly Wallace-Sanders.  emisferica, 5.2: Race and its Others, November 2008.

• “Film Review: Judith Butler, Philosophical Encounters of the Third Kind,” Journal of International Women’s Studies Vol. 10 #2, November 2008.

Articles:

“Bridging Differences through Feminist Service Learning,” On Campus with Women: Visibility and Invisibility: LGBTQ Students on Campus, Spring 2005, Volume 34, Issue 3, co-authored with Tonia St. Germain, Assistant Professor and Program Coordinator of Gender Studies.