Katja M. Guenther

Assistant Professor

AB Sociology 1997 Smith College
MA Sociology 2000 UC Davis
PhD Sociology 2006 University of Minnesota

Office: 1214 Watkins Hall
Phone: (951) 827-5853
Fax: (951) 827-3330
E-mail: katja.guenther@ucr.edu

Personal Website

Curriculum Vitae

BIOGRAPHY
Professor Guenther’s research focuses on gender, social movements, and the state in comparative perspective. She examines how gender and opportunities for feminist resistance vary across places and scales of governance. Professor Guenther’s first book, Making Their Place: Feminism After Socialism in Eastern Germany (Stanford University Press, 2010), explains why local feminist movements vary across locales even within the same national state. Making Their Place brings to light the commonly held, but little understood, assumption that where things happen influences how and why they happen. This text identifies the specific political, cultural, and spatial mechanisms that make place matter, and shows that place is central for understanding variations in how gender is organized and resisted across locales. Her work has been published in leading journals including Gender & Society, Mobilization, Signs, and Politics & Gender, among others.

Professor Guenther is currently continuing her work on feminist resistance in post-socialist Europe, as well as a project examining secular social movement activity in the United States. The Secular Movements Study examines the rise of atheism and other religious non-belief as a motivation for political and cultural social action. Professor Guenther is a member of the graduate specializations in gender, race and class, and political economy and global social change at UCR. She is also a faculty affiliate of the Department of Women’s Studies and the Labor Studies Program. For more information, please see http://faculty.ucr.edu/~katja/.

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