Researchers

Eric Chambers is currently adjunct professor of linguistics at the State University of New York at New Paltz.  His dissertation focused on language use among gay-identified members of an online erotic hypnosis messageboard.  He has been published in the Journal of Language and Sexuality, and in a forthcoming volume of digital orality.  He is currently working on two larger projects: a linguistic treatment of erotic hypnosis trances, and its intersections with larger ideologies and language patterns of clinical hypnosis; and a cross-linguistic typology of the emergence of nonbinary pronouns and strategies in traditionally-gendered languages. He is also a self-professed "advanced beginner" bookbinder.

Daniel Copulsky is a graduate student in Social Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research focuses on marginalized sexualities and relationships, particularly LGBTQ+ and non-monogamous identities. He speaks regularly at colleges and conferences, including presentations at the Alternative Sexualities Conference, Positive Sexuality Conference, and Alt Sex NYC.

Tess Allen is a PhD Candidate and Assistant Teacher in Philosophy at the University of Bristol, UK. Her PhD research aims at constructing a theory of embodiment that centres around the body, intersubjectivity and freedom of agents. This framework is then applied to feminist debates concerning feminine identity and sexuality; specifically, the debate surrounding BDSM practitioners is examined with a particular interest in the silencing of these practitioners by sex-negative scholars and the claims of BDSM perpetuating female objectification. Tess is also the current Subject Editor in Philosophy for the Bristol Institute for Learning and Teaching (BILT) Journal.

Dr. Liza Berdychevsky is an associate professor in the Department of Recreation, Sport and Tourism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She graduated from the University of Florida with a Ph.D. in Health and Human Performance and from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, with an M.B.A. in Business Administration. Dr. Berdychevsky’s research revolves at the nexus of sexual health and wellbeing in leisure and tourism contexts, adopting a gender-sensitive and a life course-grounded approach. She uses a variety of methodologies in her projects, including quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods. Overall, Dr. Berdychevsky’s research contributes to a deeper understanding of the issues associated with sexual health and violence and offers directions for health education programs and prevention and intervention methods. She has published in several leading academic leisure, tourism, and sexuality journals and presented her work at numerous national and international congresses. She serves as a consulting editor on The Journal of Sex Research, an associate editor on Leisure Sciences, and an editorial advisory board member on the Annals of Leisure Research.

Dr. Moshoula Capous-Desyllas (she/her) is Professor in the Sociology Department at California State University Northridge. She is an arts-based researcher committed to participating in anti-oppressive and decolonizing research practices, as well as engaging in social justice issues related to gender, sex, and sexuality through art. Her passion lies in highlighting the voices of marginalized communities through the use of art as a form of activism, empowerment, and social change. Moshoula has facilitated numerous community-based, photovoice research projects within various communities and collectives, including sex workers, LGBTQ former foster care youth, and LGBTQ+ refugees and asylum seekers living in Athens, Greece.

Lynnette Priscilla Coto (she/her) is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, Georgia. She graduated from Louisiana State University with a Ph.D. in Sociology and graduate minors in Women, Gender, and Sexualities Studies; and African and African American Studies. Dr. Coto also earned a Master of Arts in Applied Sociology with a graduate concentration in Domestic Violence and a Bachelor of Science in Psychology with minors in Sociology; and Crime, Law, and Deviance from the University of Central Florida. Dr. Coto’s research focuses on the intersections of gender, sexuality, and race. For her dissertation, she conducted qualitative studies on three distinct sexual subcultures- college football student-athlete hookup culture, the kink of pegging, and hookup culture at specialty gyms. She is a qualitative methodologist specializing in in-depth interviewing, ethnography, online ethnography, focus groups, participant observation, and content analysis.

Dr. Dave Holmes is Professor and University Research Chair in Forensic Nursing. Distinguished Leader, American Academy of Nursing. After completing his B.Sc. (Ottawa, 1991), M.Sc. (Montreal, 1998) and Ph.D. (Montreal, 2002) in Nursing, Professor Holmes completed a CIHR post-doctoral fellowship in Health Care, Technology and Place at the University of Toronto, Faculty of Social Work (2003). To date, Dr. Holmes received funding, as principal investigator, from CIHR and SSHRC, to conduct his research program on risk management in the fields of Public Health and Forensic Nursing. With regard to sexuality, he has conducted research is the fields of barebacking, BDSM, and public sex. Most of his work, comments, essays, analyses and research are based on the poststructuralist works of Deleuze & Guattari and Michel Foucault. His works have been published in top-tier journals in nursing, criminology, sociology and medicine. He was appointed as Honorary Visiting Professor in Australia, Indonesia, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

Sam Hughes is a PhD Candidate at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research focuses on the lives and experiences of people into kink, BDSM, and sexual fetishism. His work also explores the relationship between sexuality, mental health outcomes, attitudes,  institutions, social context, and intersectionality. Relying on both qualitative and quantitative methods, his work has appeared in peer-reviewed academic research journals, and has also been covered in Vice, Psychology Today, Insider, and Dan Savage’s Savage Lovecast.

Dr. Ummni Khan (she/her) is an Associate Professor in Law and Legal Studies at Carleton University (unceded territories of the Algonquin nation, Ottawa, Canada).  She researches the socio-legal construction of deviant sexuality, with a focus on kink, sex work, and representations of hardcore eroticism.  Drawing on an intersectional lens,  Dr. Khan asks, how can we reframe deviancy through an epistemology of pleasure?  Her work can be found in a variety of peer-reviewed and popular venues including The Canadian Journal of Law and Society; The University of Toronto Law Journal; Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology; Feral Feminisms; and Ryerson’s Centre for Free Expression Blog.

Rob Matchett is a graduate student in the department of sociology at Louisiana State University. Matchett’s research is centered around sociology of gender & sexuality, embodiment, health & mental health, and sociological social psychology. Matchett was the recipient of the 2015 Ray Coppler Disability Awareness Award and 2018 Outstanding Graduate Student Award. Matchett’s current research explores the lived experiences of individuals who participate in pup play.

Anna Mense is a PhD candidate and a lecturer in Philosophy at the Justus-Liebig University Giessen, Germany. In her research, she is currently focused on the Philosophy of Love and Sexualities. Anna graduated in Philosophy, English, and German as a teaching profession with a thesis on the question “Is there an Aesthetic Pleasure?”, in 2014. She was committed to university policy for many years and she founded the undergraduate conference Dia:logos in 2015. Her PhD project “On the Capability to Love” aims at understanding the role that so-called deficient loving has for the concept of love. She is working on an integrative concept of love that is capable of explaining how far loving always implies both options of success and deficit as well as it demands the cultivation of personal capabilities. In her second research project “Sex Speech. Problems of Tabooed Talk and the Potential of a Sex-positive Discourse and Sex-positive Spaces”, Anna analyses the role that language and concepts have for different aspects of sexualities, sexual experiences, and sexual identity. She locates this matter within the examination of a sex-negative socio-political climate and an emerging sex-positive subculture.

Emily E. Prior is the Executive Director for the Center for Positive Sexuality. Since 1996 she has been teaching formal and informal classes about a variety of sexuality-related topics including Gender, Deviance, Relationships and Family, and Feminism. She is an adjunct professor at several colleges and universities, has over a dozen publications, and presents at conferences around the U.S. She is frequently interviewed about her research, the Center, and positive sexuality in general. She also won the Vern Bullough Award for research. Her research focuses on the intersections of identity, feminism, deviance, leisure, gender, and sexuality.

Dr. Brad Sagarin is a professor of social and evolutionary psychology at Northern Illinois University and the head of the Science of BDSM Research Team (www.scienceofbdsm.com). Brad’s current research focuses on consensual BDSM, social influence, and statistics. Brad has been published in a variety of scholarly journals, has given radio and podcast interviews, has consulted for radio and television programs, and has delivered invited lectures to academic and non-academic organizations. His research has been cited in newspapers and magazines, including The Economist and New Scientist. He holds Doctorate and Master’s degrees in Social Psychology from Arizona State University, and a Baccalaureate degree in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Dr. Elisabeth “Eli” Sheff is the foremost academic expert on polyamorous families with children. Sheff’s first book, The Polyamorists Next Door (2014), details her 15-year study of poly families with kids and was just reprinted in paperback, and her second book Stories from the Polycule (2015) is an edited anthology of writings by poly folks. When Someone You Love is Polyamorous (2016) is Sheff’s shortest book that guides family members and significant others who are trying to understand a polyamorous loved one. Dr. Sheff is currently in her fourth wave of data collection for her 20+ year study of polyamorous families with children.

Dr. Richard Sprott received his Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from UC Berkeley in 1994. He researches identity development and health/well-being in people who express alternative sexualities and non-traditional relationships, with a special emphasis on kink/BDSM sexuality, and polyamory or consensual non-monogamy. All of these efforts highlight the ways in which stigma, prejudice, minority dynamics, language, identity development, and community development all intersect and affect each other. Richard currently teaches courses in the Department of Human Development and Women’s Studies at California State University, East Bay, and graduate and undergraduate level courses at various universities in the Bay Area, including UC Berkeley, the California Institute of Integral Studies, and Holy Names University.  He will be President of the Society for the Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity (Division 44 of APA) in the 2021-2022 academic year.

Dr. Liam Wignall is a senior lecturer in Psychology at Bournemouth University. Using qualitative research methods, he explores the identities and experiences of non-heterosexual individuals related to: kink, BDSM, and fetishes; pornography consumption; drag subcultures; non-exclusive sexualities; and sexual consent. He draws on theories from psychology, sociology and cultural studies, focusing on the impact of the internet and the role of community participation for these individuals. He is a member of the International Academy of Sex Researchers and International Society for Sexual medicine, and serves on the British Psychological Society’s Psychology of Sexualities committee. He is also editor for the Psychology of Sexualities Review and associate editor for Psychology & Sexuality and Journal of Positive Sexuality.

D J Williams is the former Director of Research for the Center for Positive Sexuality and a social and behavioral scientist at Idaho State University. He completed doctoral and postdoctoral studies at the University of Alberta (Canada), and his scholarship intersects leisure science, forensic behavioral science, criminology, and sexology. D J is a leading international expert on deviance as leisure experience, and he has been a consultant and/or expert witness on several high-profile forensic cases involving sexuality and actual or potential violence. His research has been published in numerous academic books and journals, including Journal of Sexual Medicine, Homicide Studies, Deviant Behavior, Journal of Forensic Sciences, Leisure Sciences, and Critical Criminology.

Dr. Ryan G. Witherspoon is a licensed clinical psychologist (CA PSY32022) in private practice, as well as a researcher, author, and speaker. He received his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology (CSPP) at Alliant International University and holds Masters degrees in clinical and general psychology from CSPP and Pepperdine University, respectively. As a clinician, he focuses primarily on practicing psychoanalytic psychotherapy with adults and relationships, and specializes in working with diverse relationships and sexualities such as consensual non-monogamy and kink, as well as LGBTQ+ individuals and relationships. Dr. Witherspoon frequently publishes and presents on these and other topics to professional and general audiences, as well as trains clinicians in culturally competent and sex-positive approaches to working with alternative sexualities and relationships. His current research focuses on the intersections between consensual non-monogamy, stigma, minority stress, and resilience.