Frayda Cohen

  • Teaching Professor, Associate Director of GSWS, Director of Undergraduate Studies, and Undergraduate Advisor

Frayda Cohen serves as Director of Undergraduate Studies, Senior Lecturer, and Undergraduate Advisor for the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program, and as Director of the Pittsburgh Consortium for Adoption Studies (PCAS). She is a cultural anthropologist whose research interests include: children, gender, adoption, reproduction and population policy, transnationalism, and food studies. She has spent several years working in China and has been the Director for the summer 6-week study abroad program, Pitt in China. In summer 2017, she ran a summer study abroad program in Italy on gender, sustainability, and food. She regularly teaches courses on gender and the politics of food, global feminisms, gendered bodies, and popular culture. She also teaches the senior capstone for GSWS majors. As both faculty and advisor for the GSWS undergraduate program she sees the important ways in which students build their analytical and writing skills around a study of gender and sexuality in ways that uniquely prepare them for a diverse and complicated world.

 

Recent Courses


GSWS 0500: Introduction to Feminist Theory
GSWS 1180: Gender and The Politics of Food
GSWS 1150: Global Feminisms
GSWS 1450: Gender and Sustainability
GSWS 0200: Sex, Race and Popular Culture
GSWS 1910: GSWS Capstone
GSWS 1900: GSWS internship

Education & Training

  • PhD, Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh
  • BA, International Studies, New York University

Representative Publications

“Parenting Culture, Assisted Reproductive Technologies, and the Visibility of Transnational Adoption,” in Great Expectations: Intentions, Reproductive Technologies and Contemporary Parenting Culture, eds. Charlotte Faircloth and Zeynep Gurtin,Berghahn Books Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality, book series (Marcia Inhorn, ed). (Invited) Forthcoming. 

"Tracing the Red Thread: Chinese-US Transnational Adoption and the Legacies of 'Home,' ” Anthropologica: Journal of the Canadian Anthropology Society, vol. 57 no. 1 (2015). 41-52.   Thematic Section "Kinship Travel: Relatedness through International Tourism and Travel Networks," co-edited by Frayda Cohen, Amy Speier, & Susan Frohlick.