We are happy that Professor Tara Quinn is a new a career-line Assistant Professor shared between Gender Studies and the College of Humanities. Welcome and congratulations, Dr. Quinn!

What’s your research specialization? What projects are you currently working on? 

My principal research interests concern processes of socio-economic justice and development in the Global South, including land rights, gender, and transitional justice in postwar contexts. My dissertation (Resistance in transition: Gender, Land and Transformative Justice in Postwar Sri Lanka) tackled this with ethnographic exploration of the issues experienced by former landholders (mostly women) who lost access to their land during and after the lengthy war in Sri Lanka. I have developed my work into several articles and book chapters and am currently working on my first academic monograph.

 What do you love about teaching? Which course is your favorite to teach and why?

PCS 3900: Land, Power and Resistance was the first ever course I developed and taught here. It was for Peace & Conflict Studies majors at the University of Utah, launched during my postdoc (and taught in fall 2023 and 2024). It was so great to explore some of the issues of land, resistance and gender justice in a small workshop of committed students who really took some of the ideas and applied them to their own areas of expertise. I ended up supervising one student’s honors thesis after this class and it was wonderful to see her ideas in action—I learned so much.

What did you do before coming to the U of U? What’s your background?

Prior to beginning my PhD in 2016, I worked as a senior manager in several (UK) non-profits, mostly grant-writing for arts outreach and literacy campaigns. I also worked as a freelance writer and editor, and published a collection of literary non-fiction called The New Brick Reader (House of Anansi Press, 2013)—the culmination of six years working with Brick, A Literary Journal as an assistant editor in Toronto.

What do you look forward to about Utah/the U of U?

I’ve loved living in Utah the last three years. Everything about it (the climate, the culture) is a complete break from my dozen or so years in Scotland and my life in Canada before that. Everyone has been so welcoming, and the views of the mountains in SLC never get old. But my favorite place so far is southern Utah—anywhere you can get away from it all (in under 4 hours!) and clamber over red rocks in a t-shirt in January is fine by me.