Tala Khanmalek, Ph.D.

Biography

Tala Khanmalek (all pronouns) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Women and Gender Studies at CSU Fullerton. Her research engages public health and other archives with queer, disabled, and feminist of color epistemologies, including oral histories that she conducts herself with relatives, organizers, and healing justice practitioners. 

 

Khanmalek started her career at CSUF in the fall of 2019, right before the global COVID-19 pandemic, and earned tenure early in June 2023. She has 15 continuous years of experience teaching entry and upper-level courses as well as interdisciplinary courses of her own design in both public and private universities. While at CSUF, she has taught “Introduction to Women’s Studies” and “Advanced Readings in Feminist Theory” on Gloria Anzaldúa in every possible modality: in-person, hybrid, synchronous, and asynchronous. Additionally, she is a trained UndocuAlly (Titan Dreamers Resource Center) and has served as a faculty mentor in the Faculty/Graduate Student Mentoring Program, the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program, and the Summer Undergraduate Research Academy. 

 

Most notably, she was the inaugural faculty advisor to SWANA (South West Asia and North Africa), the undergraduate student organization that created the SWANA Inter-Club Council, the SWANA Resource Center, and the new SWANA Minor, among other system-wide achievements like creating a SWANA category on the CSU application. Khanmalek co-authored a scholarly article with three SWANA students about activism: “Khalas! Institutionalized SWANA Erasure, Resilience, and Resistance in Higher Education” published in the Journal of Leadership, Equity, and Research . She was awarded Assigned Time for Exceptional Levels of Service to Students to complete this article and develop research presentations about it with co-author Gina Waneis, which they presented in the HSS Lecture Series (“Making Our Voices Heard: Co-Writing and the Praxis of Equity”) and at UC Riverside’s SWANA Con (“SWANA Student Activism and Representational Politics”). 

 

Relatedly, Khanmalek has presented on her own work and activist approaches to research for students in CSUF’s Summer Undergraduate Research Academy (“Listening to and Learning from Non-Linear Narratives”), CSUF’s Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program (“Borders and Bodies”) and the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship West Coast Regional Undergraduate Conference (“Research and Social Justice”), the Faculty and Student Activist Solidarity Roundtable as part of CSUF’s Social Justice Week, and the Pollak Library’s Faculty Noon Time Talks (“The 1917 Bath Riots: Uncovering Public Health History in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands”).

 

Khanmalek loves to write—poetry, prose, op-eds, scholarly articles, you name it!—and was co-Chair of writing programs for the CSUF faculty organization Researchers and Critical Educators (RACE). Check out the book, The Gloria Anzaldúa Survival Guide for Navigating Apocalyptic Times Like a Phoenix , co-written with students in her Advanced Readings in Feminist Theory course, and the poem, "A Collective Poem: What is Healing? ", co-written with students in her Introduction to Women's Studies course. 

 

Khanmalek has been the recipient of many awards, grants, and fellowships including, most recently, the Michael Lynch Service Award from the GL/Q Caucus of the Modern Language Association and Q/T Caucus of the American Studies Association, and the following awards from CSUF: a One Book One CSUF Incentive Grant, a Humanities and Social Sciences Summer Research/Writing Stipend, and a Milton Gordon New Faculty Research and Creative Activities Stipend. 

 

She earned her PhD in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality and her BA in Ethnic Studies and French, also at UC Berkeley. She was formerly a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the American Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies Programs at Princeton University; a Visiting Scholar at UC Santa Cruz’s Science and Justice Research Center and Duke University’s John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute; and a lecturer in the Liberal Studies Department at CSU Los Angeles. Please email her at tkhanmalek@fullerton.edu for a complete CV that details her publications, presentation, collaborative projects, and other work beyond the above-mentioned at CSUF.