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  • Dr. Ari Burford – Women’s and Gender Studies

Ari Burford, PhD

Ari Burford
Senior Lecturer

Northern Arizona University
Women’s and Gender Studies

Bldg 70 Rm #229
Phone: 928-523-6719
Ari.Burford@nau.edu

Dr. Ari Burford earned their PhD in English with an emphasis in feminist theory and literature in 2007 from the University of Arizona and began teaching at NAU in 2009. Their dissertation is an intervention into women’s rights histories by recognizing literature that resisted heteropatriarchal colonialist violence against Chican@s and Indigenous people in the late nineteenth century, writers who also critiqued women’s rights’ alliances and complicity with white supremacy.  Dr. Burford has published articles in Genders and The Journal of Lesbian Studies.  Their current writing project is a queer memoir about resilience, about surviving incest, about calling attention to white supremacist colonialist heteropatriarchy.  Dr. Ari has a passion for teaching, critical thinking and community action and resistance, dance, poetry, feminism, queer studies, nature, and creativity all of which they think of as interconnected.  At NAU, Dr. Burford co-facilitated the start up of the Queer Studies minor, along with Dr. Karla Hackstaff and Dr. Jaclyn Pryor, as well as the first-year LGBTQIA Living Learning Community.  Dr. Burford also wrote the proposal to get funding for NAU’s LGBTQIA Office of Resources and Support.

Interests

  • Queer and Trans Studies
  • Queer Literature
  • Indigenous Studies and Decolonizing Pedagogy
  • Anti-racist, Anti-cissexist, Anti-Ableist, Decolonizing Anti-capitalist Queer Poetry, Poetics, Performance, especially Slam
  • Feminist Theories
  • Art, Community Action, and Resilience
  • Theory and Action that combats rape culture, including interpartner and workplace violence, war, and the prison industrial complex
  • Memoir and Disrupting Hegemonic History
  • Health and Healing
  • Trauma Studies

Courses

WGS 333: Queer Theories, WGS 382 Queer Literature and Film, WGS 310 Chicana Feminisms, WGS 191 Women, Gender Identity and Ethnicity, WGS 399 Memoir/Writing as Resistance, First-Year Seminar LGBTQ Identities and Meanings, WGS 600 Introduction to Feminist Theory, and WGS 601: Queer Studies.

Accomplishments

Attendee at “Black Life Matters” Conference in Tucson, AZ. January 17-19th, 2015.

Presenting chapter two of manuscript from their memoir at “Writing by Writers” Workshop in Tomales Bay, CA and working directly with Dorothy Allison. October 21-25, 2015.

“Her Mouth is Medicine”: Beth Brant’s and Paula Gunn Allen’s decolonizing queer erotics.” Journal of Lesbian Studies 17(2): 167-179. 2013.

Presented a paper at ‘(Im)possible Queer International Feminisms’, University of Sussex, 17-19 May 2013.

Created new Queer Studies minor in WGS with Dr. Pryor.

Publications

“Her Mouth is Medicine”: Beth Brant’s and Paula Gunn Allen’s Queer Erotics as Decolonizing Methodologies.” The Journal of Lesbian Studies 17.2 (2013): 167-179.

“Cartographies of a Violent Landscape: Helena María Viramontes’s and Cherríe Moraga’s Remapping of Feminisms in Under the Feet of Jesus and Heroes and Saints.” Genders 47 (2008).

“Harriet Tubman: The Life and Stories.” Book review of Jean Humez’s Harriet Tubman: The Life and Stories. Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association 61.2 (2007).

“Communities of Silence and Music in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage.” Selections from the Eighth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. Ed. Davis, Laura and Jeanette McVicker. New York: Pace UP, 1999. 269-75.

Welcome
Location
Room 100 Building 70
SBS West
19 W McConnell PO Box: 5695
Flagstaff, AZ 86011
Contact Form
Email
womens.studies@nau.edu
Phone
928-523-3300
Fax
928-523-5560