Ann Russo is the Director of the Women's Center and a Professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies. Her scholarship, teaching, and organizing focus on queer, antiracist, and feminist movement building to end violence and to build socially just and caring communities. Integral to her work is exploring the praxis of building alliances and coalitions for social change.
Her most recent book Feminist Accountability: Disrupting Violence and Transforming Power explores ideas and practices central to feminist anti-racist work, community accountability and transformative justice abolitionist organizing, and U.S-based feminist anti-imperialist efforts to address violence in the global south. The book shares approaches and practices that cultivate communal healing, intervention, accountability and transformation in response to systemic intimate, interpersonal and state violence. She weaves the concept of accountability throughout the book and approaches it as a set of everyday practices that contribute to the feminist work of transforming oppression and violence, rather than reproducing them.
She is also the author of Communities Engaged in Resisting Violence (2007), Taking Back Our Lives: A Call to Action in the Feminist Movement (2001) and co-editor of Talking Back and Acting Out (2002) and Third World Women and Feminist Perspectives (1990). And she is also published in a number of books, journals, and feminist periodicals.
Courses Regularly Taught
- WGS 400 Feminist Theories
- WGS 314/414 Antiracist Feminism
- WGS 320/420 Transformative Justice
- ISP 102 Chicago Women’s Activism
- WGS 303/480 Gender, Violence, and Resistance
- WGS 395 Senior Seminar
- WGS 485 Women, Gender, Agency, & Social Change
Areas of Interest
- Feminist, Anti-Racist, and Queer Theories and Practices for Justice
- Transformative Justice: Collective Healing, Intervention, Accountability, and Transformation in response to interpersonal, community, and state violence
- Critical race theory: Interrogating Whiteness, Privilege, and Accountability
- Intersectional Movement-Building
Major Publications
- Feminist Accountability: Disrupting Violence and Transforming Power
- Communities Resisting Violence, with Melissa Spatz (Women and Girls Collective Action Network, 2007)
- Talking Back and Acting Out: Women Negotiating the Media Across Cultures, co-edited with Sandra Jackson (Peter Lang, 2002)
- Taking Back Our Lives: A Call to Action for the Feminist Movement (Routledge, 2001)
- Without Apology: Andrea Dworkin's Art and Politics, co-authored with Cindy Jenefsky. (Westview Press, 1998)
- Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, co-edited with Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Lourdes Torres (Indiana University Press, 1991)