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Sun Min
Director of Media Relations
Alyssa Vine
Associate Director of Media Relations
Rebecca Young
Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies
Rebecca Young, assistant professor of women's studies, joined the faculty of Barnard College in 2004.
Professor Young is a sociomedical scientist whose research includes social epidemiology studies of HIV/AIDS, and evaluation of biological work on sex, gender, and sexuality. Her research and scholarship have been supported by the National Institutes of Health, the National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities, and the Social Science Research Council.
Prior to joining the faculty at Barnard, Professor Young was a principal investigator and deputy director of the Social Theory Core at the Center for Drug Use and HIV Research of the National Development and Research Institutes, Inc.
During the 1980s, she worked in the Washington, D.C. area running street outreach programs for street-based drug users and sex workers and conducting AIDS education in jails and prisons. Her team's ethnographic research on lesbian and bisexual women drug users in New York and Boston was used in the 2006 Amnesty International Report Stonewalled—Still Demanding Respect: Police Abuse and Misconduct Against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender People in the USA. She is currently active in a number of campaigns for peace and social justice.
Professor Young is now working on the manuscript for Sex, Hormones, and Hardwiring: Re-thinking the Theory of Brain Organization (expected publication date 2009). This work is based on the first comprehensive analysis of human studies that draw on Brain Organization Theory, which postulates that hormone exposures in utero permanently "organize" the brain to be either masculine or feminine.
Among the courses she teaches at Barnard are "Colloquium in Feminist Theory"; "Introduction to Women and Health"; "Introduction to Sexuality Studies"; and "Gender and HIV/AIDS".
Selected Publications
Nehm, R.H. and Young, R.M. "Sex Hormones" in Secondary School Biology Textbooks, Science & Education 17(10): 1175-1190, 2008.
"The Trouble with 'WSW' and 'MSM': Erasure of the Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Person in Public Health Discourse" (with I. Meyer), American Journal of Public Health 95 (2005)
"Exploring an HIV Paradox: An Ethnography of Sexual Minority Women Injectors" (with S. Friedman and P. Case), Journal of Lesbian Studies 9 (2005)
"The Political Science of Hormone Folklore," Cardozo Women's Law Journal 11 (2005)
"The (Non-Living) Wages of WEP: A Barrier to Vocational Rehabilitation For Substance Users" (with E. Benoit), Substance Use and Misuse 39 (2004)
"Assessing Risk in the Absence of Information: HIV Risk Among Women Injection Drug Users Who Have Sex with Women" (with G. Weissman and J. Cohen), AIDS and Public Policy Journal 7 (Fall 1992)
Taking It to the Streets: Street Level AIDS Prevention in Washington, DC (Washington, DC: Drug Policy Foundation, 1990)
AIDS and Adolescents: Resources for Educators (Washington, DC: Center for Population Options, 1987)
212.854.9088
EDUCATION:
B.A., Bryn Mawr College
M.A., Ph.D., Columbia University
RELATED LINKS:
SPECIALIZATIONS:
Gender and sexuality in science
Feminist theory
Women's health