Karen B. Hanna

Karen Buenavista Hanna

Ph.D. Year 2018
Postdoctoral Fellow
Connecticut College- Assistant Professor
Connecticut College

Specialization

Race and Nations

Education

Ph.D., Univ. of Calif., Santa Barbara (2018) 
M.A., Univ. of Calif., Santa Barbara (2013) 
M.S., Mercy College (2005) 
B.A., Brown Univ. (2003) 

Bio

Karen Buenavista Hanna is the 2018-2019 Ann Plato Post-Doctoral Fellow in American Studies at Trinity College. She is a feminist scholar and oral historian who uses interdisciplinary methodologies to understand the gender and sexual politics of anti-imperialist Filipina/o organizations across time and space. Her teaching encourages students to be more than mere spectators to history and theory, challenging them to consider how the classroom might be a site to enact dreams for liberation and healing. Her writing has been published in Hyphen Magazine, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, and is forthcoming in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, CUNY Forum, and American Quarterly. She has held numerous fellowships, including awards from the Mellon Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS).

Research

Comparative radical social movements; women of color, transnational, and indigenous feminisms, queer of color critique; anti-racist decolonial pedagogy; disability justice; critical university studies. Prior to her doctoral studies, from 2003 to 2011, Karen was a New York City public school teacher, pre-GED instructor with the Brooklyn Public Library, and community organizer working with Filipina/o immigrant youth and domestic workers.

Projects

Karen's dissertation, Makibaka!: A Feminist Social History of the Transnational Filipina/o American Left, 1969-1992, uses oral histories and feminist methodologies to examine the history of the anti-imperialist Filipina/o Left in North America, beginning with the political exile of activists during the Marcos period in the Philippines and traces the Left's ideological shifts over time and across space. Karen's research has investigated how contradictions emerge and are resolved within community organizations and how organizers and activists address intra-organizational conflict and find healing.