College of Liberal Arts

Dr. Patti Duncan, Associate Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, has been at OSU since 2009. She earned her B.A. from Vassar College, and her M.A. and Ph.D. at Emory University's Institute for Women's Studies. She specializes in transnational feminist theories and movements, women of color feminisms, feminist media studies, feminist motherhood studies, queer studies, and critical mixed race studies. Professor Duncan teaches courses including "Transnational Feminisms," "Women of Color Feminisms," "Disney: Gender, Race, and Empire," "Women in World Cinema," and "Foundations in Multiracial/Transnational/Queer Feminisms." She is Editor of Feminist Formations, a leading journal in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. For more information, see feministformations.org. She is the current Secretary of the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA). 

Patti Duncan is the author of Tell This Silence: Asian American Women Writers and the Politics of Speech (University of Iowa Press, 2004), and numerous articles about women of color feminisms, anti-racist feminist pedagogies, and transnational feminisms. She is co-editor of Mothering in East Asian Communities: Politics and Practices (Demeter Press, 2014), and co-director/producer of Finding Face (2009), an award-winning documentary film exploring the effects of gendered violence in Cambodia, which has screened at fourteen national and international film festivals. Her current research focuses on narratives of rescue, migration, and motherhood in representations of women and youth in the global South. And she served as editor of a volume on women's lives in Asia and the Pacific for a four-volume reference collection, Women's Lives Around the World: A Global Encyclopedia (ABC-CLIO/Greenwood Press, 2018).

In Fall 2004, Professor Duncan was a visiting researcher at Ewha Woman's University in Seoul, Korea. In 2007, she led a travel seminar in Cuernavaca, Mexico on the topic of gender, migration, and globalization. She spent Fall 2008 on a ship, teaching for the Semester at Sea program, during which she traveled and taught in the Bahamas, Brazil, Namibia, South Africa, India, Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Hong Kong, China, Japan, Hawai'i, and Costa Rica. In 2014 she co-led a travel seminar to India on the topic of women, gender, and feminist activism, in partnership with Krishnammal College for Women. And in 2015, she team-taught a course on gender and sexualty in Greece. She is a former recipient of grants and fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Civil Liberties Public Education Fund, and the National Women’s Studies Association.