The College of Humanities and Sciences is pleased to announce the appointment of Olivia Landry, Ph.D., to the position of chair of the Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies. Olivia began her new position on July 1.

Olivia is an associate professor of German studies in the School of World Studies. Her research broadly spans film and media as well as theater and performance studies. Her first book, “Movement and Performance in Berlin School Cinema” (2019), explores the contemporary film movement the Berlin School through a recalibration of the body, movement, spectacle, sensation and spectatorship in cinema. Her second book, “Theatre of Anger: Radical Transnational Performance in Contemporary Berlin” (2020), examines contemporary transnational theater in Berlin through the affective-political scope of anger as an attributed and justified affect that responds to social injustice. Olivia’s latest book, “A Decolonizing Ear: Documentary Film Disrupts the Archive” (2022), investigates how documentary film can challenge conventions of listening and recording shaped by histories of colonial ethnography and extraction.

From 2014 to 2016, Olivia was a Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pittsburgh. After that, she spent a year at Stanford University as the William H. Bonsall Acting Assistant Professor of German. Between 2017 and 2022, she was an assistant professor at Lehigh University. Her research has been supported by grants from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and the Humboldt Foundation.

The College thanks Kathy Ingram, Ph.D., the outgoing chair of the Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies for her thoughtful leadership. Kathy will continue as interim chair of the Department of Sociology. We are grateful for her service.