Wendy S. Hesford

In this episode, GLC Modern Slavery Fellow Wendy S. Hesford discusses “Enslaved Girlhoods: Gendering Terror, Human Trafficking, and Human Security” a chapter from her book-in-progress.

Exceptional Rhetorics: Regulating Childhood and Children’s Human Rights will examine the cultural and legal representations of children’s human rights and the differential visibility of the rights of children living in between or outside of citizenship and/or in states of exception and social exclusion. 

Prof. Hesford is a Professor of English and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University and the author/editor of six books, most recently, Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, and Feminisms and, with Wendy Kozol, Just Advocacy? Women’s Human Rights, Transnational Feminisms, and the Politics of Representation. She has held several visiting scholar appointments at Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Human Rights, Emory Law School, working with the Feminist Legal Project and the Vulnerability and Human Condition Initiative and at Yale University, where she held the 2016-2017 Modern Day Slavery and Human Trafficking residency fellowship at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition.

She has published essays in PMLA, Biography, Humanity, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Feminist Formations, and TDR: Journal of Performance Studies, among others. She has held visiting scholar appointments at Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Human Rights and at Emory School of Law’s Vulnerability and Human Condition Initiative. She is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, The Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Teaching Award, The Ronald and Deborah Ratner Distinguished Teaching Award, NEH Summer Seminar fellowship, several Ohio State Seed Grants, Ohio State Research Enhancement Grants, Coca-Cola Critical Difference for Women Grants and the Modern Language Association’s Florence Howe essay award.