Elise has a PhD from the Joint Program in English & Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan, where she was 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 in the U.S. reproduce and resist hegemonic ideologies of health, fat embodiment, gender, race, sexuality, and (dis)ability, with a focus on repair and reparative pedagogy.
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).