The following faculty members have been approved as Core Supervisory Faculty for students pursuing the Specialization in Gender and Women's Studies in the units listed below.

Faculty of Education

Dr. D. Kerr
Descriptions of justice, equality and rights; arguments for and against liberalism, including communitarian and feminist. Social theories underpinning social organization. Education; theories of education.

Dr. C. Russell
Connie Russell is a Professor in the Faculty of Education and Lakehead University Research Chair in Environmental Education. Her interests include: critical environmental education; critical animal studies and animal-focused education; fat studies and fat pedagogy; gender and education; feminist and ecofeminist pedagogies. For more info, see: https://www.lakeheadu.ca/users/R/crussell/node/17385.

Dr. P. Sameshima (on sabbatical July 1, 2023 - June 30, 2024)
Pauline Sameshima is a Professor at Lakehead University's Faculty of Education. She is a curriculum theorist who works across the science and humanities fields on large research projects with a particular interest in mobilizing research, learning across broad audiences, and innovating university-community learning collaborations. Her interests include: arts integrated studies, poetic inquiry, narrative inquiry, fiction as research, visual inquiry, multi-model research, interdisciplinary research, teacher education, community engagement, and health and identity studies.

Department of English

Dr. A. Den Otter 
Gender construction, queer theory, women writers of British eighteenth-century and Romantic periods, Anna Barbauld, Mary Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft.

Dr. M. Flegel
Monica Flegel's research interests focus on cultural studies, specifically child culture, fan culture, and animal studies. She is the author of Conceptualizing Cruelty in Nineteenth-Century England, Pets and Domesticity in Victorian Literature and Culture, and the co-author, with Dr. Judith Leggatt, of Superhero Culture Wars: Politics, Marketing, and Social Justice in Marvel Comics. She has supervised Master's students' creative and research projects on a wide variety of pop culture topics, including the horror genre, video games, feminist social media discourse, and young adult literature.

Dr. A. Guttman
Anna Guttman's primary field is postcolonial literature, particularly that of South Asia and its diaspora. Her areas of interest include the nation, multiculturalism, gender and sexuality, translation, Jewishness, diaspora, and the sociology of literature. She is the author of Writing Indians and Jews: Metaphorics of Jewishness in South Asian Literature (2013), The Nation of Indian in Contemporary Indian Literature (2007) and co-editor of The Global Literary Field (2006). Her recent and forthcoming publications span articles and book chapters on South Asian queer writing,  popular fiction in India and Indigenous-Jewish intersections. Her work on Jewishness in South Asia was supported by SSHRC. She welcomes the opportunity to supervise graduate students in all areas of postcolonial studies.

Dr. D. Hannah
Daniel Hannah's research primarily centres on Romantic, nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century American and British literature (especially Henry James) with a focus on queer desire and style, masculinity, and the body. He has supervised both research and creative projects and is also happy to supervise projects grounded in accounts of gender and sexuality in film and comics. 

Dr. D. Ivison
Gender and sexuality in Canadian, Australian, and 19^th century British and American literatures, science fiction, and popular culture. Intersections of gender and sexuality with colonialism; space and place; cities and urbanism; and environmentalism and ecocriticism, particularly in relation to climate change.

Dr. J. Leggatt
Interests include post-colonial women writers and the intersection of feminist and post-colonial theory, especially the different constructions of gender and sexual identities in different cultures, the hierarchical relationships of gender and racial discrimination, and literary constructions of colonized cultures as feminine. She has written papers that study these issues in works with Beth Brant, Lee Maracle and Pauline Melville.

Dr. S. Pound
Poetry and poetics, creative writing, writing pedagogy, media history, feminist poetics, gender/sexuality in American literature.

Dr. B. Stolar
Intersections between gender, sexuality, race, class, culture, religion and immigrant experiences in North American literature and film, feminist literary and film theories, gothic studies, and dance studies.

Dr. R. Warburton
Early women's writing; early modern drama; histories of sexuality; history of emotions; feminist and gender theories; queer theories; queer cultural production; contemporary theatre.

Department of Health Sciences

Dr. C. Levkoe
Charles Levkoe is the Canada Research Chair in Equitable and Sustainable Food Systems, a Member of the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada, Director of the Sustainable Food Systems Lab, and an Associate Professor in the Department of Health Sciences at Lakehead University. His community engaged research is embedded in transdisciplinarity and intersectionality, and uses a food systems lens to better understand the importance of, and connections between social justice, ecological regeneration, regional economies and active democratic engagement. https://foodsystems.lakeheadu.ca/

Department of Indigenous Learning

Dr. K. Burnett 
Kristin Burnett is a professor in the Department of Indigenous Learning at Lakehead University. Burnett is a settler scholar whose research interests can broadly be defined as: Indigenous history, settler colonial and critical race studies, women and gender history, the social history of health and medicine, and Canadian history. Burnett has published broadly on topics related to Indigenous health and well-being, and much of her current research and policy work engages with systemic barriers people face accessing health care, social services and supports, and food.

Burnett has worked extensively with First Nations and Indigenous organizations to develop research that can be used for advocacy and policy development. For example, Burnett collaborated with community members from Fort Albany First Nation and Food Secure Canada to draft a national report on food costing entitled “Paying for Nutrition: A Report on Food Costing in the North.” More recently, she has worked with legal clinics and health organizations in northern Ontario to identify barriers experienced by individuals living without personal identification, especially birth certificates and the disproportionate challenges faced by Indigenous peoples and communities in the north. 

Outdoor Recreation, Parks & Tourism

Dr. L. Potvin
Dr. Leigh Potvin (she/her) is an Assistant Professor and Director in Outdoor Recreation, Parks and Tourism. Her interdisciplinary research interests, advocacy, and activism centre around: queer youth and pedagogies, fat activism, inclusive recreation, and food justice.

Department of Psychology

Dr. K. Oinonen
Dr. Oinonen is a registered clinical psychologist with interests in biopsychosocial feminist perspectives. Her research interests are broad but one focus is on women’s health and well-being, and maximizing research/knowledge to aid women in making informed decisions. Research to date has examined issues (hormonal contraceptive side effects, preconception health, women’s sexuality), health conditions (Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, eating disorders, Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder), and developmental/biological periods (e.g., menarche, the premenstrual phase, menopause) that are of relevance to women. Gender, sex, sexuality, hormones, disabilities, power/privilege, and experiences unique to a specific sex or gender are also of interest. More information can be found at: https://www.lakeheadu.ca/users/O/koinonen.

Dr. D. Scharf (on sabbatical 2023 - 2024)
Dr. Scharf is a registered clinical and health psychologist. She researches mental health, addiction, and primary medical services and systems for vulnerable groups including women, veterans, people with serious mental illness, chronic health conditions, and workplace injuries. She applies a wide range of qualitative and quantitative methods to her subject areas of interest, including analysis of expert opinion (Delphi method), qualitative interviews and focus groups, statistical analysis of big data sets, and real-time, real-world electronic data capture (Ecological Momentary Assessment; EMA).

Dr. J. Tan
Dr. Tan is a clinical psychologist with research interests in culture and gender.  Her projects are in the areas of depression, self-harm behaviours, emotional regulation, interpersonal violence, leadership styles, human rights and social justice.  She utilizes both quantitative and qualitative methods of research.

Department of Social Work

Dr. J. Murphy Oikonen
Jodie Murphy is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Work. Her research interests include sexual assault, police response to sexual violence, social work in health care, women and children's health and wellness; specifically Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome, and addiction in pregnancy. 

Dr. N. Timoshkina
Dr. Natalya Timoshkina is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Work (Orillia Campus). Her main areas of interest and research expertise include women's and gender issues, human trafficking and sex work, internationalism, alternative organizational forms, and qualitative research methods.

Department of Sociology

Dr. J. Jarman
I am interested in the way that law shapes social and economic outcomes, particularly but not exclusively in the work world. Much of my research has focused on the use of law to attempt to reduce gender inequalities and tackle the growth of precarious work.  This has taken me into the related question of how social movements work towards change and how they integrate (or reject) the role of law in that process of change.

Dr. D. Mišina
My research areas include social theory, media and culture, popular culture and socio-political change, and globalization and global social transformations (for more information, please visit: https://www.lakeheadu.ca/users/M/dmisina/node/17190). I am interested in working with students who wish to engage in theoretical explorations of feminist thought and knowledge in local, national and/or international contexts.

Dr. B. Parker
Barbara Parker is an Associate Professor in Sociology. She welcomes graduate supervision in the areas of gender, food, health, critical nutrition studies and food security. She is also interested in the post-secondary student experience, critical pedagogies and qualitative feminist methodology. To see more of her work, please visit: www.lakeheadu.ca/users/P/bfparker/node/16900

Dr. A. Puddephatt
Broadly, my interests include pragmatist, constructionist, and feminist analyses of knowledge production, science and technology studies, symbolic interactionism and related traditions of interpretive theory, the sociology of leisure and recreation, sociology in higher education, and ethnographic and qualitative research methods.

Department of Gender and Women's Studies

Dr. L. Chambers* (also approved for the Faculty of Education and Social Justice Studies Program)
*(On sabbatical January 1st, 2023-June 30th, 2023)
Feminist and queer theory, law and equality rights (gender, sexuality, and religious freedom), the historical construction of marriage and family, the history of adoption, and gender-based violence.

Dr. J. Chisholm (also approved for the Social Justice Studies Program)
Jen welcomes students who are interested in motherhood; reproductive justice; reproductive technologies; embodiment; campus sexual violence; feminist/social justice activism; feminist theory, feminist research methods; or feminist pedagogy.

Dr. J. Roth (also approved for the Faculty of Education, Department of English and Social Justice Studies Program)
Jenny welcomes students interested in working in the areas of feminist law and literature; cyberfeminism; feminist cultural studies; feminist fan studies; women and/in leadership; or feminist pedagogy.