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Rachel Carson College Faculty Fellows

Sikina Jinnah

Sikina Jinnah is Rachel Carson College's new faculty chair!

The Chair of the Faculty is an Academic Senate member, other than the Provost, who is elected by the college Faculty to serve a two year term, and will serve as a member of the Executive Committee.

Dr. Jinnah is an Associate Professor in the Politics Department, an affiliated faculty member in the Environmental Studies Department, and a 2017 Andrew Carnegie Fellow. Her research focuses on the shifting locations of power and influence in global environmental governance, and in particular the role of transnational actors in environmental decision-making. Her most recent projects examine how key norms in global climate politics shape power relations, the role of U.S. preferential trade agreements in shaping environmental policy in trading partner nations, and the politics of climate engineering governance. 

Felicity Amaya Schaeffer

Research Interests

Transnational feminism, migration, Latin American/Latino studies, Chicana/o studies, technology and the body, sexuality

Biography, Education and Training

Felicity Amaya Schaeffer is Professor of the Feminist Studies Department and the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department as well as an Affiliate Faculty in Latin American and Latinx Studies. Her first book, Love and Empire: Cybermarriage and Citizenship Across the Americas (New York University Press, 2013), follows Internet-mediated marriages across the United States, Colombia, and Mexico alongside neo-colonial fantasies of racial and gendered difference across borders. Her second book, Unsettled Borders: The Militarized Surveillance on Sacred Indigenous Land (Duke University Press, 2021) re-maps the virtual border war alongside the ongoing settler colonial war with Indigenous peoples. She was also one of the editors of the Anthology, Precarity & Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship (Rutgers 2021) and has published articles in a variety of international journals in Mexico, France, and Brazil, and U.S. journals such as Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society; American Quarterly; Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, and Sexualities Journal.

Selected Publications

  • Books

  • Love and Empire: Cybermarriage and Citizenship Across the Americas, New York University Press, January, 2013.

  • Unsettled Borders: The Militarization of Surveillance on Sacred Indigenous Land, Duke University Press, 2022.

  • Select Articles

  • “Spirit-Matters: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Cosmic Becoming Across Human/Nonhuman Borderlands.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 43 (4), May 2018.    https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/696630

  • “BioRobotics: Surveillance and the Automation of Biological Life,” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 4 (1), 2018.https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/article/view/29635/pdf

  • “Transnationalism: Gender and Queer approaches,” Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks: Gender Studies, 2015.

  • "Flexible Technologies of Subjectivity and Mobility across the Americas," Special Issue of the American Quarterly Journal: Rewiring the 'Nation': The Place of Technology in American Studies, Fall 2006.

  • “Cyber-brides and Global Imaginaries: Mexican Women’s turn from the National to the Foreign,” in eds. Denise A. Segura and Patricia Zavella, Women and Migration in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands: A Reader.  Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.

  • "Planet-Love.com: Cyberbrides in the Americas and the Transnational Routes of U.S. Masculinity," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Winter 2006 (vol. 30, no.2).

  • “Cyberbrides and Global Imaginaries: Mexican Women’s Turn from the National to the Foreign,” In Space and Culture: International Journal of Social Sciences 7, no. 1 (Feb 2004): 33-48.