Harrisburg faculty member builds bridges through gender studies

MIDDLETOWN, Pa. - Mary Zaborskis, associate professor of American studies and gender studies in the Penn State Harrisburg School of Humanities, is building bridges with other disciplines through gender and sexuality studies - a field she said provides lenses for examining a variety of subjects.

"I feel really so grateful that I get to do this work at Penn State Harrisburg - in every layer of the institution," she said, noting the benefits of being in an interdisciplinary program. "I get to be in conversation with students and colleagues that are doing interesting work in these fields but bringing it to bear on their historical periods or on their particular areas of disciplinary training."

In fall 2025, with the support of the Office of the Chancellor, Zaborskis helped launch the Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies Hub on campus, and in December, her book, "Queer Childhoods: Institutional Futures of Indigeneity, Race, and Disability," was shortlisted for the Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book.

A hub for collaboration

The Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies Hub is intended to be a collaborative space for students, faculty and staff to share knowledge, foster research and build community through interdisciplinary programming and public engagement.

"The goal of the Hub is to bring together people from across [campus] that are interested in these fields and provide venues for exchanging and sharing work and resources, for supporting research endeavors and bringing in interdisciplinary scholars who might be able to speak to a range of audiences to help to grow the intellectual community here on campus," Zaborskis said.

The hub has hosted events including an ongoing works-in-progress colloquium series where faculty and graduate students share their research; a recent presentation by SaraEllen Strongman, assistant professor of Afro-American and African studies at the University of Michigan; and a film series loosely themed around gender and sports planned for this spring. After the fall production of "Radium Girls," the hub hosted a talkback featuring the director, actors and Penn State Harrisburg faculty members from diverse disciplines.

The hub also established a micro-grant program to support projects that are related to the fields of gender, sexuality and women's studies.

Zaborskis, who noted that she was approached with the idea of starting the hub by college Chancellor David Callejo Pérez, said faculty and students from all five of Penn State Harrisburg's schools have been represented in hub activities so far, and she hopes interest will continue to grow.

"It's been a great way to connect with colleagues across schools who are interested in these fields, and who are taking the frameworks of these fields, and bringing it to bear on their discipline, whether it be public policy, business or psychology," she said. "It's been great to get to participate in helping to cultivate that community here."

Book recognition

In 2024, Zaborskis published her first book, "Queer Childhoods: Institutional Futures of Indigeneity, Race, and Disability." The work was shortlisted for the Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book in December 2025 and was a finalist for the 2025 Lamba Literary Award in LGBTQ+ Studies.

The book examines how children's genders and sexualities were managed in various institutions that were established for marginalized populations in the 19th and 20th centuries, such as Native American boarding schools, reform schools, schools for children with disabilities and African American industrial schools.

Boarding schools are sometimes painted as beautiful campuses for the elite, Zaborskis said, but there's a darker side - institutions where members of minoritarian populations were abused and traumatized.

"I find that gender and sexuality studies provides me with lenses that I then get to bring to a whole range of work and materials," she said. "So I feel particularly honored and excited that a literary organization recognized the book. My Ph.D. is in English, but my work … is very interdisciplinary. I've made my home now in an American studies program, which has been incredibly supportive of this work."

Zaborskis also edited a 2025 volume of "The Routledge Companion to Gender and Childhood," a 35-chapter volume featuring contributors from around the world and across disciplines. She and a colleague at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, are co-editing a special issue of a journal called "The Lion and the Unicorn," focused on queer texts and youth, expected to publish this year.

"I just feel very lucky and grateful that I get to do this work," Zaborskis said. "There are, I think, a lot of misconceptions about what it means to study gender and sexuality, but I find it to be a rigorous field, an interdisciplinary field."

Zaborskis said people sometimes think the field of gender and sexuality studies is ideologically driven, she said, but she emphasizes that it is a field grounded in evidence and logic. She's interested in how gender and sexuality studies provides a different way for students to view their work, whether it's in law, journalism or museum studies.

"People might be impacted in different ways, but at the end of the day, everyone has a gender, everyone has a sexuality," she said. "It doesn't mean that you're positively or negatively impacted by that, but that, given the world that we move through … that does sometimes inform the ways that we interact with different systems of power, different institutions or different agents of institutions. And it's just one of many factors that informs it. So providing those tools for students and then seeing where that takes them - I find that always very motivating and inspiring."