NATALIE HAVLIN

Natalie Havlin is an Associate Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College at the City University of New York (CUNY). She holds a Ph.D. in English and a Graduate Minor in Gender and Women's Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Her research focuses on Latina/o writers and artists who have contributed to U.S. urban social movements since the early 20th century. Havlin’s book manuscript in progress, Feeling Movements: Race and the Affective Politics of Alliance in Latina/o Cultural Production, theorizes approaches to intra-ethnic and interracial alliances developed by Latina/o cultural workers and their collaborators from the 1920s to the 1980s in New York City and San Francisco. Chapters include analyses of the discourses of alliance in essays, poetry, fiction and visual texts by Salvadoran writer Ella Ruth Rostau, Colombian novelist Isabel Pinzón de Carreño, Puerto Rican cultural worker Jesus Colón, Chicana editor and journalist Elizabeth 'Betita' Martínez, Puerto Rican playwright Miguel Pinero, Jamaican writer Claude McKay, African American writer Langston Hughes, and Chinese American painter and poet Martin Wong.

Havlin’s other research interests include transnational and Third World feminisms, disability studies and queer theory. She served as the co-editor of WSQ (formerly Women’s Studies Quarterly) with Dr. Jillian Báez (College of Staten Island) from 2017-2019. She co-edited a special issue of WSQ on feminist approaches to Beauty. Her writings and book reviews on gender and sexuality appear in Feminist Erasures (ed. Kumarini Silva and Kaitlynn Mendes), WSQ, Equality Archive, Feminist Formations, and Gender and History .

Havlin is the recipient of various fellowships and awards including a Black, Race and Ethnic Studies Initiative Research Grant, Faculty Fellowship at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center (2016-2017), PSC/CUNY Faculty Grant Awards (2013-2020), the Faculty Fellowship Publication Program (2014), and the Woodrow Wilson National Women’s Studies Dissertation Fellowship (2011).

Havlin also served as one of the co-coordinators of the Colloquium for Latina/o Culture and Theory and the K-16 Collaboration Councilor for the national council of the American Studies Association.

Drawing on her research on coalition building, Havlin works with education labor unions and community organizations in New York City and the Midwest toward implementing community-based alternatives to punitive discipline and systems of incarceration. She collaborated with Dr. Michael Dumas, Dr. Gary Anderson, and Teachers Unite on a report The Disappearance of Black and Latino Teachers in New York City (2014) (funded through an Education Research Service Project Grant by the American Educational Research Association). She has also partnered with the New York Public Library and K-12 schools to facilitate public events on the history of Latina/o social movements, grassroots approaches to decreasing punitive discipline and policing in K-12 schools, and approaches to transformative justice.

Contact at nhavlin@lagcc.cuny.edu