People
Diane Price Herndl
Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Professor of English
Office: CMC 202
Phone: 813-974-0987
Email
Curriculum Vitae
Biography
I was the Chair of the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from 2013 until 2023 and have returned to the faculty for the 2025-26 school year to teach Women of Color Writers: Rewriting History and Reproductive Justice: History, Theory, Literature, and Practice. In previous years, I have also taught the Politics of Women鈥檚 Health; at the graduate level I regularly taught Advanced Feminist Theories and Body Politics.
I work at the intersection of several disciplines: feminist theory, American literature, medicine, and disability studies. I have long been interested in the ways that a medicalized view of the body shapes not just our perceptions of other peoples鈥� bodies, but of our own. I started working on American novels of the mid-nineteenth century that had plots centered on women鈥檚 illnesses, but I have鈥攊n the almost 40 years I鈥檝e been working on this question鈥攅nded up branching out to lots of different texts (ads, science fiction film, advice books, and photography to name a few). The questions I ask have to do with how those texts use, invoke, or create a techno-scientific (or pseudo-techno-scientific) discourse to enframe bodies. My courses often focus on non-standard bodies: technologically enhanced bodies or bodies with disabilities or illnesses.
My scholarship focused for many years on the cultural discourses of breast cancer, from autobiographies to novels, poetry, and art, and from Supreme Court decisions to pink-ribbon campaigns. Lately, I鈥檝e been looking at the role of disabled and/or technologically enhanced bodies in science fiction, especially when those bodies are involved in the gendering of folk, too. In addition to my work on bodies and cultural representation, I have published essays on American fiction, feminist theory, and narrative theory, as well as anthologies of feminist literary theory and of women鈥檚 literature. My newest scholarly work is on the role of feminism and anti-racism in higher education administration; in particular, I have been looking at the effects of Florida鈥檚 recent anti-woke legislation on WGSS programs across the state as well as on strategies of feminist and anti-racist leadership.
Education
Ph.D., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
M.A., University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
B. A., Texas Christian University