Elise is a PhD candidate in the Joint Program in English & Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan and program coordinator for the Digital Accessible Futures Lab. (Check out the Lab’s recent & upcoming events!)
Her research interests include visual and literary self-representation, feminist pedagogy, the women’s health movement of the 20th century and ongoing critiques of normative constructions of “health,” radical community-based care and health education, and fat politics/fat subjectivities. Her dissertation project explores how undergraduate women’s health courses reproduce and resist hegemonic ideologies of health, fat embodiment, gender, race, sexuality, and (dis)ability.
Elise has organized the Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshop on Disability Studies at the University of Michigan and the A.W. Mellon “Disability Studies/Disability Activism” Workshop at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
In 2015 Elise completed her MA in Gender and Women's Studies with a graduate certificate in Visual Cultures at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her MA thesis, titled "Situating Selfies," draws on feminist and queer theory, feminist disability studies, and several auto-ethnographic interviews to analyze how people navigate embodiment, identity, community, and self-care technologically and in online spaces. This project takes up selfies as a practice and phenomenon, putting them in conversation with 20th century women's self-representational photography and performance-based body art.
In 2012 Elise graduated with honors from DePaul University with a BA in Women's and Gender Studies (minors: English Literature and History of Art and Architecture).