Christine Garlough

Joint appointment: Folklore Program
Office Hours: by appointment
Garlough CV 35. July 2025

Christine Garlough is Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, Director of the Center for Research on Gender and Women, and UW’s UNESCO Co-Chair of Gender, Wellbeing and a Culture of Peace. One of the founding members of the Ethics of Care Initiative at University of Wisconsin, Madison, her research constellates around issues of political communication, social justice, and feminist ethics of care. For more than two decades, she has worked with feminist activists in India and the U.S. who create political performance to support social change. This research appears in her scholarly monograph, Desi Devas: Activism in South Asian American Cultural Performance, as well as journals such as Communication Monographs, Performance Research, Quarterly Journal of Speech, International Journal of Press/Politics, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, and Women’s Studies in Communication. As part of her public humanities scholarship, she has developed three digital archives dedicated to the preservation and public availability of feminist protest materials. She currently is an active member of three research groups: (1) Gender, Aging and Activism, (2) Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives, and (3) Rise of the Manosphere. Her new book project, Caring Folk: Progressive Politics in an Age of Populism, engages with political and philosophical issues at the intersection of feminist ethics of care, expressive culture, and the politics of acknowledgment.

Courses Taught – Department of Gender and Women’s Studies: 

GWS 950, Gender, Performance and Performativity
GWS 880, Graduate Pro-Seminar in Gender and Women’s Studies
GWS 720, Graduate Seminar in Feminist Communication and Philosophy
GWS 640, Gender and Women’s Studies Senior Capstone
GWS 468, Feminism, Folklore and Comparative Literature
GWS 449, Feminist Politics and Ethics of Care
GWS 428, Gender and Expressive Cultures
GWS 426, Women, Culture and Grassroots Politics Across the Globe
GWS 414, Gender, Performance and Sexuality
GWS 310, Care and Feminist Politics
GWS 102, Gender, Women, and Society in a Global Perspective