2023-2024 Fellows
Catherine Baker (she/her)
Catherine Baker is a postdoctoral researcher with DCU Anti-Bullying Centre. Her current research focuses on tracking the algorithmic radicalisation of boys and men into the manosphere via Tiktok. Previously to this, she completed her PhD at Loughborough University (Online Civic Culture Centre), exploring how misogynist incels use digital affordances to curate and distribute male supremacist ideology to a mass audience. Her research interests include online radicalisation, male supremacism, masculinity, counter-epistemic communities, disinformation and digital platforms. Publications include a chapter on post-truth identities in the Routledge Companion to Media Misinformation and Populism. Follow her on Twitter @Cathy__Baker.
Sophie Bjork-James (she/her)
Sophie Bjork-James is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University. She has over ten years of experience researching both the US based Religious Right and the white nationalist movements. Her work focuses on the ways gendered and racial ideals become relevant to religious politics and social movements in the post-Civil Rights era United States. She is the author of The Divine Institution: White Evangelicalism’s Politics of the Family (2021) and the co-editor of Beyond Populism: Angry Politics and the Twilight of Neoliberalism (2020).
Blu Buchanan (they/them)
Blu Buchanan is a University Fellow in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at UNC Asheville. Their academic writing has appeared or is forthcoming in journals like GLQ: The Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies and PUBLIC: A Journal of Imagining America, as well as edited volume chapters in Black Feminist Sociology: Perspectives and Praxis and Unsafe Words: Queer Perspectives on Consent in the #MeToo Era. They have also written extensively in the public sphere, particularly about movements to disarm campus police and confronting trans antagonism in the university.
Jessica Cabrera
Jessica Cabrera is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the University of California, Irvine, and a graduate of the UC Irvine Law, Society, and Culture Emphasis. Her work explains how feminist Title IX anti-harassment laws in the U.S. came to be influenced by men’s rights groups, and offers strategies for how feminists and progressives can prevent civil rights laws from becoming co-opted by right wing groups. Jessica’s dissertation research is supported by the UC Irvine Center for Organizational Research, the UC Irvine Center for Citizen Peacebuilding, and the UC Irvine Initiative to End Family Violence. She is a Fellow with the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism, and earned a Visiting Student Researcher position at the UC Berkeley Center for the Study of Law and Society starting in August 2021. This year, she was accepted to speak on her work at the United Nations Commission for the Status of Women with Sociologists for Women in Society. Some of her work has been published in The Research Handbook on Gender, Sexuality, and the Law, as well as The Annual Review of Law and Social Science. Follow her on twitter @winbackTitleIX
Emily. K. Carian (she/her)
Emily K. Carian is an Assistant Professor of Teaching in Sociology at the University of California, Irvine and one of the co-founders of the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism. Her research asks how masculinity and male supremacism contribute to persistent gender inequality. Dr. Carian’s forthcoming book with New York University Press draws on in-depth interviews with men who are feminists and men who are men’s rights activists. By comparing these two groups’ trajectories into gender activism, she explains why men’s profeminism is ineffective in combating gender inequality.
Ryan Coulling (he/him)
Ryan Coulling is a recent PhD graduate from Carleton University. Broadly, his research is grounded in aspects of social justice. He is especially interested in the violence and harassment by people of privilege directed towards marginalized people. This research interest culminates in the investigation of white, heterosexual, male, right-wing extremists, their emotional and affective reactions, the hate and fear they circulate, and the violent crimes they commit. His doctoral research examined antifeminist masculinities on the manosphere.
Katherine Alejandra Cross (she/her)
Katherine Alejandra Cross is a Ph.D Candidate at the University of Washington, currently working on a dissertation about how social media dissolves meaningful political ambition, and is a poor fit for modern social movements. She's also about to publish a book on the subject, entitled "Log Off: Why Posting and Politics (Almost) Never Mix" with Little Puss Press. She is also a widely-published social critic whose work has frequently focused on the myriad problems, travails, and occasional triumphs of online culture, her interest in which grew out of her decade-long research on online harassment and misogynistic harassment campaigns. She's a former columnist for WIRED magazine, and has also been published in Rolling Stone, The Verge, The Baffler, and numerous other publications. Much of her writing seeks to understand who we are and who we become when we interface with information technology, and while she desperately needs to log off she knows there's also another fascinating story waiting for her the moment she hits 'refresh.
Pierce Dignam (he/him)
Dr. Pierce Dignam is a sociologist who studies the intersection of social movements, gender, collective identity, and politics in the digital age. His work has focused on the social movement dynamics of male-supremacist spaces on Reddit, the Trump campaign’s working-class appeals, and Trump supporters' cultural understandings of masculinity and anti-establishment politics. His research has been published in Race Gender and Class, Signs, Social Currents and Men and Masculinities.
Chelsea Ebin (she/her)
Beginning in the fall of 2023, Chelsea will be an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Drew University. Her research aims to understand the proactive and forward-looking agendas of right-wing movements to identify better how these movements pose a threat to liberal democratic institutions and the provision of rights to historically underrepresented and oppressed groups. Her research and teaching are informed by a commitment to challenging supremacism, and she teaches a range of courses examining how structural inequalities in US political institutions, including the law, are produced, maintained, and challenged.
Eli Erlick
Eli Erlick is an author, activist, and Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 2011, she co-founded Trans Student Educational Resources, a national organization dedicated to transforming the educational environment for trans students. In the years that followed, Eli's work and writing has centered the intersections of political philosophy, social movements, Transgender Studies, and queer/feminist theory. Her book Before Gender: Lost Stories from Trans History, 1850-1950 (Beacon Press, 2025), investigates what we learn from thirty underreported trans narratives that radically shift the popular knowledge of gender history.
Her second book, Belonging Through Exclusion: Understanding the Transgender Far-Right (University of Chicago Press, 2025) uses over one hundred interviews with transgender members of the far-right to explore the development of their political identity, ways to effectively shift their political beliefs, and why past efforts to change their ideologies have failed. Her recent work has appeared in dozens of media outlets, books, and journals, including Rolling Stone, the Routledge Handbook for Literature and Social Justice, and the Harvard Review of Psychiatry.
Melissa Gira Grant
Melissa Gira Grant is a journalist and author. She is is a staff writer at The New Republic and the author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work (Verso). She has reported on violence against massage workers in Flushing; attacks on trans rights across Texas; resistance to police killings in Columbus; the rise of QAnon and anti-sex trafficking panic; and the global movement for sex workers’ rights. Her forthcoming book, A Woman Is Against the Law: Sex, Race, and the Limits of Justice of America (Little, Brown and Company), uses narrative journalism and original archival research to offer a feminist indictment of the criminal legal system, drawing on 150 years of women’s attempts to appeal to the law in search of safety, accountability, power, and freedom.
Judith Goetz (she/her)
Judith Goetz holds degrees in comparative literature and political science, and is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. She is also a member of FIPU (Research Group Ideologies and Policies of Inequality) and the German Research Network ‘’Women and Right-wing Extremism’. Her interests and research focuses on right-wing extremism and women, as well as gender and anti-feminism. Recently she co-edited the anthologies "Right-wing extremism Volume 4: Challenges for Journalism" (2021), "Counterstrategies against Right-wing extremism" (2022) and "Global Perspectives on,Anti-Feminism. Far-Right and Religious Attacks on Equality" (2023).
Brenna Helm (she/her)
Brenna Helm is a PhD candidate in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University. Brenna is also a RSA Security Scholar. Her research broadly focuses on extremism, extremists’ use of the Internet, online subcultures, and bias-motivated crimes. Much of her work to date has examined affordances of the Internet and the role it plays in radicalization and subcultural engagement. The goal of her research is to better understand Internet facilitation of deviant and criminal behaviors, as well as how our knowledge of these behaviors offline can be leveraged to cultivate a deeper understanding of these mechanisms online and across digital modalities. She has a particular interest in male supremacism and far-right extremism. More specifically, Brenna is interested in the role of gender within supremacist movements and how groups attempt to normalize their ideologies within mainstream media.
Nicole Iturriaga
Nicole Iturriaga is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society and Sociology. She is a sociologist with a focus on science and technology, social movements, collective memory, gender, and human rights. Outside of work, she loves nature, climbing, and making pottery.
Greta Jasser
Greta Jasser is a research associate at Georg-August-University Göttingen and a PhD candidate at Leuphana University Lüneburg. Her research analyses the nexus of far- right and male supremacist social movements and technology. She is particularly interested in alternative platforms and their significance for group and ideology formation as well as in the field of digital (counter)publics and platform governance.
Megan Kelly (she/her)
Megan Kelly is a PhD candidate, and a co-founder of IRMS. Her research interests include the relationship between masculinities, whiteness and victimhood in supremacist movements, and responses to these movements. She is particularly interested in identity formation, misogynist ideologies, and relations between different male supremacist identities.
Robert Lawson (he/him)
Robert Lawson an Associate Professor in Sociolinguistics at Birmingham City University, UK. He has held posts at the University of Pittsburgh, USA (Fulbright Scottish Studies Scholar, 2012-13) and the University of Jyväskylä, Finland (Junior Visiting Professor, 2019-2020). He has publications in a number of major international journals, including Discourse, Context and Media, English World-Wide, Gender and Language, Social Media + Society, and Journal of Sociolinguistics. He is the editor of 'Sociolinguistics in Scotland' (Palgrave, 2014), the co-editor of 'Sociolinguistics: Application and Impact' (Routledge, 2016), and the author of 'Language and Mediated Masculinities' (Oxford University Press, 2023). His current research interests include language and masculinities in media spaces, the language of male supremacist online influencers, and developing pedagogical interventions to help counter male supremacism among young men.
Meredith Pruden (she/her)
Dr. Meredith L. Pruden is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication and Media at Kennesaw State University, as well as a member of the Media & Democracy Data Co-op, member of the Coalition for Independent Tech Research, and Affiliate with the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP) at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she spent the 2021 academic year working as a Postdoctoral Researcher. Dr. Pruden earned her PhD in Communication and certificate in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies from Georgia State University, where she also was a Presidential Fellow with the Transcultural Conflict and Violence Initiative. Her interdisciplinary, methodologically agnostic research lies at the intersection of feminist media studies and political communication, exploring—in its sociotechnical context—harmful online content (e.g., hate speech, supremacist and violent extremist communication) and “risky research,” far-right media and politics, and the mis/disinformation and conspiracism circulated by and through these groups across a variety of platforms and channels.
Amelia Roskin-Frazee
Amelia Roskin-Frazee is a doctoral student in Sociology and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow at the University of California, Irvine. Her research uses mixed methods to examine how gender, race, and perceived sexuality affect sex crime criminalization in the U.S. criminal legal system. Her current work focuses on how the queering of Black female sexuality affects the criminalization of women for sex crimes in California. Her previous research on identity and experiences with Title IX processes appeared in Feminist Criminology and The International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy. Outside of academia, she runs an organization that sends books about sexuality and gender identity to schools, youth homeless shelters, and juvenile detention centers.
Ann-Kathrin Rothermel (she/her)
Ann-Kathrin (Katya) Rothermel is a feminist political scientist and Postdoc researcher at the University of Bern. Her work connects insights on the gendered dynamics in the radicalisation in online male supremacist movements of the manosphere and other far-right spaces with global and transnational governance efforts to prevent and counter terrorism and violent extremism. She has previously worked as academic advisor to civil society projects on digital democracy and prevention of online hate speech and radicalization. Her work has been published in international peer-reviewed journals such as International Affairs, the International Feminist Journal of Politics, and Big Data and Society.
Anna Schwenck
Anna Schwenck is a cultural sociologist who works on the intertwining of authoritarianism, neoliberal capitalism, and supremacist masculinity in and beyond the Euro-American world. She completed her PhD at Humboldt University Berlin on the questions of how young people loyal to the government in today’s Russia relate to the regime’s ‘flexible authoritarianism’ and why they ground their quests for change in neoliberal solutions to social problems. In her current role as scientific coordinator of the trans-European and interdisciplinary project Popular Music and the Rise of Populism in Europe, situated at Oldenburg University, Germany, Ms. Schwenck investigates popular music culture’s capacity to diffuse masculinist, neoliberal and authoritarian worldviews and endue such abstract concepts with emotional meaningfullness. Especially with regard to her research project on the ongoing protests of so-called Corona (or Pandemic) skeptics in German-speaking countries, Ms. Schwenck examines how positive experiences of commonality – through popular music, dancing, but also the collective, peaceful fight against a common enemy – may form new coalitions between diverse actors, possibly enhancing the normalization of neo-authoritarian beliefs among mainstream publics in liberal democracies.
Erin Spampinato (she/her)
Erin Spampinato is an expert in the literature and history of sexual violence and a cultural critic. She holds a PhD in English Literature from the Graduate Center, CUNY, and has taught literature and gender studies at Colby College, Georgetown University, University of Southern Maine, the City University of New York, and elsewhere. She regularly publishes on the topic of sexual violence in both academic and public-facing venues. Her academic writing can be found in *PMLA*, *differences,* *VLC*, and *Studies in the Novel,* while her public-facing writing can be found in *Electric Literature,* *The Rambling,* and *The Guardian,* among other venues. She is co-editing a collection with Doreen Thierauf and Micheal Dango, under contract with SUNY Press, on theorizing contemporary humanist approaches to sexual violence, and is in the process of revising her book manuscript, on the early literary history of sexual violence, for which she won at 2020 ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship. She is an independent scholar who works as an educator at a public elementary school.
Hanah Stiverson
Dr. Hanah Stiverson is the Extremism Researcher for the Extremism & Human Rights Program at Human Rights First where she focuses on the mainstreaming of male supremacy, anti-LGBTQ+ extremism, and attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Her broader research focuses on the rising fascist movement in the U.S. and how it has integrated into mainstream spaces through digital recruitment, branding, and social networking.
Her co-authored book, “Racist Zoombombing,” details the racist hate speech and online harassment faced by users of the Zoom platform during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Her upcoming edited volume “Banal Fascism Online: Weaponizing the 'Everyday' for Extreme Ends,” addresses the rising mainstream fascist movement in the U.S. and how it intersects with online culture and technology.gns.
Catherine Tebaldi
Catherine Tebaldi is a PhD candidate at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research uses the tools of digital ethnography and linguistic anthropology to understand women’s role in white male supremacism. Her dissertation uses digital and traditional ethnography to explore ideologies of language, gender, and education across a broad spectrum of right-wing moms, from white nationalist vloggers to conservative public school teachers. Her latest publication is #JeSuisSirCornflakes: Racialization and Resemiotizaton in French Nationalist Twitter, which looks at how spelling changes became a moral panic about white genocide. She is now working on a paper called Metapolitical Seduction: White nationalist women’s language and far-right metapolitics.
Lisa Sugiura
Dr. Lisa Sugiura is Reader/ Associate Professor in Cybercrime and Gender at the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Portsmouth. She is an internationally recognised expert in online gender-based violence, and has conducted research on online misogynistic groups and technology-facilitated domestic abuse and sexual violence. Her work has involved funding from the UK Home Office and the National Cyber Security, and she is the author of the book ‘The Incel Rebellion: the rise of the manosphere and the virtual war against women.’ Lisa is passionate about tackling gender inequality, and elevating victim-survivors voices and marginalised person’s experiences.
Verity Trott
Dr. Verity Trott is Lecturer in Digital Media Research at Monash University where she researches feminist and anti-feminist digital cultures. Her published research explores digital feminist activism, networked masculinities, anti-feminist backlashes (with a focus on several men’s online communities that are part of the Manosphere), and platform politics. Her work has appeared in journals including New Media & Society, Feminist Media Studies and Information, Communication & Society. She is a founding member of the Automated Society Working Group at Monash University in which she explores the social, political and cultural impacts of automation, data practices and digital cultures from a feminist standpoint.
Giovanna Vingelli (she/her)
Giovanna Vingelli holds a PhD from the University of Calabria (2004). She is a feminist sociologist, and Senior Researcher and Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Calabria (Italy). Her research interests lie in the fields of the analysis, development and design of gender equality policies (gender mainstreaming, gender budgeting and education), gender based violence and social movements (feminist and anti-feminist movements). Her latest research focus on men’s rights movements in Italy, their discourse and strategies, and their connection with the Italian and international far right.
Canton Winer (he/they)
Canton Winer is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Northern Illinois University. Broadly, his research focuses on the relationships between gender and sexuality. He is a leading sociologist studying asexuality, an identity referring to those who experience low/no sexual attraction. Dr. Winer's current work explores asexuality’s generative potential for the sociology of gender and sexuality, queer studies, and feminist studies. His research has won various national and regional awards, including the 2023 Graduate Student Paper Award from Sociologists for Women in Society-South and honorable mention for the 2022 ASA Sexualities Section's Best Graduate Student Paper Award. Dr. Winer's research has appeared in Sociological Inquiry, Sexualities, Men and Masculinities, Sociology Compass, and the Journal of Homosexuality. His writing has also appeared in USA Today, the Huffington Post, and NPR’s Loh Down on Science. He holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Irvine.
Samantha Pinson Wrisley (she/they)
Samantha Pinson Wrisley is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. She was previously a Mellon Interventions Project Public Humanities Teaching Fellow at Emory University. Her work unfolds at the intersection of far-right studies, feminist, and queer theory, affect theory, cultural studies, and critical sexuality studies. Dr. Wrisley is specifically interested in the affective dimensions of misogyny, how it circulates in both feminist and anti-feminist affective environments, and how it is connected to other forms of hatred such as white supremacy and transphobia. Her previous work includes a critical analysis of common feminist conceptions of misogyny, published under the title “Feminist Theory and the Problem of Misogyny” in Feminist Theory in 2021. She also has a forthcoming piece in the journal Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry comparing and contrasting feminist heteropessimism with involuntary celibacy’s (i.e., incels’) specific brand of sexual nihilism known as “the Black Pill.”
Dr. Wrisley is currently working on two book projects. The first is a monograph, titled The Sexual Politics of Hate, that endeavors to continue her work building a comprehensive feminist understanding of misogyny that can be mobilized as a form of feminist resistance in a post-#MeToo landscape. The second is a collaborative effort with scholars Riley Johnson and Shelley Feller that seeks to understand and counter transphobic iterations of feminist theory and praxis.