Barret Katuna, Executive Officer
Barret Katuna became the full-time Executive Officer of Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS) in January 2017. Barret has been a member of SWS since 2008. Her initial SWS involvement began with the International Committee where she served as a lead United Nations delegate to the Economic and Social Council for SWS.
Prior to working for SWS, Barret was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Connecticut from August 2014 – December 2016. Barret completed her Ph.D. in April 2014 from the University of Connecticut. The title of her dissertation is: Breaking the Glass Ceiling?: Gender and Leadership in Higher Education. While pursuing her Ph.D., Barret also earned certificates from the Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Program and Human Rights Institute. Barret has published her research in Societies Without Borders and Social Movement Studies. Barret is originally from Northeastern Pennsylvania and received a Bachelor’s Degree (French and Political Science) and Master’s Degree (Political Science) from Lehigh University before pursuing her graduate studies in Connecticut. Barret currently resides in South Glastonbury, Connecticut.
Adia Harvey Wingfield, Past-President
Adia Harvey Wingfield is Professor of Sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research examines how racial and gender inequality persist in professional occupations. Dr. Wingfield has lectured internationally on her research in this area, and her work has been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals including Social Problems, Gender & Society, and Ethnic and Racial Studies. She is also a contributing writer for The Atlantic and has written for Fortune and Inside Higher Ed. Professor Wingfield is the author of several books, most recently No More Invisible Man: Race and Gender in Men’s Work, and has won multiple awards from sections of the American Sociological Association.
Tiffany Taylor, President
Tiffany Taylor is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Kent State University at Kent (USA). She earned her B.A. in Political Science, M.S. in Sociology, and PhD in Sociology from North Carolina State University. Her teaching and research focus on topics related to work and inequality, including race, gender, and class. She has authored dozens of articles and book chapters, including research on policy implementation of programs for economically disadvantaged mothers in North Carolina and Ohio. More recently she has co-edited the inequality textbook (with Carissa M. Froyum and Katrina Bloch) Creating and Contesting Social Inequalities: Contemporary Readingsfrom Oxford University Press and co-edited a volume (with Katrina Bloch) for the book series Advances in Gender Research on marginalized mothers/mothering from the margins published by Emerald Group Publishing in fall 2018. She has served SWS on the Membership Committee, as Vice President, and is currently the President-Elect.
Andrea Boyles, Sister to Sister Committee Co-Chair
Dr. Andrea (Drea) S. Boyles, a native of St. Louis, MO, earned a B.A. in English and M.A. in Sociology from Lincoln University of Missouri. Later, she received her PhD in Sociology from Kansas State University with concentrations in Gender and Criminology. Her research interests are social inequality; gender; the intersection of race, class, and gender; criminology; incarceration; race, place, and policing, ethnography; neighborhood disorder and crime prevention. She has taught a broad series of courses in Anthropology, Sociology, and Criminal Justice ranging from Culture and Communication, Social Problems, Sociocultural Theory, and the Sociology of Poverty and Conflict to Policing, Victimology, Race, Ethnicity, and Gender and Public Policy in Criminal Justice.
Dr. Boyles has also taught within the Missouri prison system and presented research on the effects of incarcerated parents on children. As author of Race, Place, and Suburban Policing: Too Close for Comfort, Dr. Boyles’s current research hinges on community disorder and black social ties with another manuscript under contract with the University of California Press.
Melanie Heath, Parliamentarian
Melanie Heath is Associate Professor of Sociology and Graduate Chair at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. She earned her B.A. in Philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley, her M.A. in Sociology from California State University, Sacramento, and her PhD in Sociology from the University of Southern California. Her areas of research include gender, sexuality, the family, religion, and the state. She is the author of One Marriage Under God: The Campaign to Promote Marriage in America (NYU Press, 2012). She is co-author with Janice Aurini and Stephanie Howells of The How To of Qualitative Research (Sage, 2016). She has published in Gender & Society, Signs, The Sociological Quarterly, Sociological Perspectives, Qualitative Sociology, and Contexts. She is currently completing a comparative project on government regulation of polygamy that has been funded through The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Standard Research Grant and Insight Grant). In 2017, she became President Elect for RC32: Women in Society of the International Sociological Association and has served as chair for the Feminist Activist Award (2013-2016) and on the Nominations Committee (2015-2017) for the Sociologists for Women in Society.
Natasha Santana, Assistant to the Executive Officer
Veronica (Ronni) Tichenor, Past Treasurer
I am an Associate Professor of Sociology, employed by the State University of New York Polytechnic Institute. I joined SWS in 1996 and have served on several committees, including Discrimination, Academic Justice, and Sister-to-Sister, co-Chairing the last from 2010-2012. I served on the Program Committee for the SWS Winter Meeting in Tamaya, New Mexico in 2013, and served two years on the Editorial Board for Gender & Society.
Veronica Montes, Treasurer
Veronica Montes is an Assistant Professor at Bryn Mawr College in the Department of Sociology. Her research falls in two areas: on immigration from Mexico and Central America to the United States and on the intersection between the process of homemaking, belonging and migration. Her publications have appeared in Gender & Society, Gender, Place and Culture, Apuntes, Contexts, and Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. She is a recipient of an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral recently began her term as Treasure of the Sociologist for Women in Society Association.