Degrees:

• Ph.D. in American Literature, University of Minnesota;
• B.A. in English, Denison University

Biography:

Stephanie Athey is a writer, educator, program builder and Professor of Cultural Studies at Lasell University in Newton, Massachusetts where she directs the Honors Program and teaches a variety of courses on structural oppressions, human rights and critical global studies. As an educator, she specializes in community-based partnerships for intercultural, experiential learning and empowerment. Her book, Torture In The National Security Imagination, centers the role of everyday torture in the US empire past and present and argues that, at base, torture is propelled by local social functions, conducted by networked security collaborations, and publicly supported by a durable social imaginary.

Her edited volume Sharpened Edge: Women of Color, Resistance and Writing (Praeger) collects transnational feminist scholarship on armed struggle, human rights organizing, and cultural resistance strategies of women of color and indigenous women in Africa, India, and the Americas. She is guest editor of Prose Studies special issue “Revaluing the Human: The Moral Economy of Human Rights” with Wendy S. Hesford and K. M. Ferebee. Her essays on human rights, security, colonial discourse, eugenics, human rights, and the construction of race have appeared in a variety of scholarly journals.

Stephanie has held Visiting Scholar appointments at Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Human Rights and the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and she served as Research Associate at the William Monroe Trotter Institute for the Study of Black Culture and president of the Association of Academic Programs in Latin America and the Caribbean. She directs an educational partnership in Coatepec, Mexico with María del Refugio López Cruz and is Executive Director of the nonprofit Niños de Veracruz.