Campus Directory

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Biography

As a professor in the interdisciplinary fields of sociology, gender studies, and psychological sciences, Jessany Maldonado, Ph.D., lays the groundwork for students to recognize their power both within and outside of the classroom. Placed at the forefront of her teaching is the acknowledgement and exploration of diversity. This focus helps students examine ways to correct the imbalances of power that privilege some identities at the expense of others. Specifically, Maldonado's student-centered approach facilitates a collaborative examination and intentional application of the field's foundational principles to quotidian phenomena. Combined with her courses' purposeful design to innovate and transform curious minds, these teaching strategies fulfill the following goals: encourage collaborative and interactive learning relationships within diverse groups and prepare students to execute theory-informed practice (social change) in their social world(s). Aligned with the goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion, her pedagogical practices and mentorship styles prepare students to commit to the recognition, affirmation, and inclusion of various identities, perspectives, and lived experiences. This purposeful commitment to praxis will lead to the creation of more equal and equitable societies around the globe.

Her high-impact pedagogy has been formally recognized by the College of Arts and Sciences Dean's Office and Faculty Development Committee at the University of South Florida in Tampa, Fla. After only her first year of teaching as a professor, Maldonado was promoted to become the interim director of undergraduate studies and awarded the CAS Liberal Arts Teaching Award Honorable Mention for the 2023-2024 academic year. This career promotion and recognition symbolize the high-impact teaching outcomes of Maldonado's pedagogy.

Having graduated magna cum laude from both Purdue University and the University of Northern Iowa, she earned a bachelor's degree in psychological sciences with a minor in LGBT studies and a master's degree in women's and gender studies, respectively. In 2023, she graduated summa cum laude from Indiana University with a doctorate in gender studies. Valuing culturally affirmative and sex-positive epistemologies, Maldonado's empirical interests are situated within the study of human sexuality.

Maldonado's bachelor's research explored subcultural sexualities, where she examined how human attraction to non-human entities could be considered another type of queered sexualities in their own right. In contrast, her master's thesis, entitled "Afro Culture and Performance within the Bar Space," illustrated the complexities of Black sociocultural performances within spaces of leisure. She found that African Americans exercised community development, migration, and rituals of hospitality to foster and strengthen their kinship bonds in predominately Black spaces located within predominately non-Black cities. Her doctoral research, entitled "Black Women-Loving Women's Socio-Sexual Narratives," centered on Black women and their socio-sexual experiences. Specifically, she found that Black women wield transformative power over their intimate lives in how they identify, occupy and transform space, and spiritualize physical intimacy.

Currently, Maldonado continues to pursue ethnographic projects that investigate how Black women perform and intertwine spirituality and sexual intimacies; Black heterosexual men's conceptualizations of masculinity and socio-sexual experiences with Black women; and the relational and spiritual perseverance of Black women's interethnic relationships.

View Jessany Maldonado's CV.

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Presentations/Publications/Productions

Maldonado, J. (in preparation). "Black kweer life in Atlanta: Black women-loving women's socio sexual intimacies." Routledge.

Maldonado, J. (2025). Heteronormativity and resistance within Black WLW's communities. Journal of Black Sexuality and Relationships. 11 (3-4)

Maldonado, J. (2025). Black WLW's styles of sociability. Journal of Black Sexuality and Relationships. 11 (3-4)

Maldonado, J. (2024). "I know what I like": Black women's same-gender dating preferences. Journal of Black Sexuality and Relationships, 11 (1-2), 145-173.

Presenter, March 2025

"Black Women-Loving Women's Socio-Sexual Narratives." Department of Women's and Gender Studies, Southern Connecticut State University, New Haven, Conn.

Presenter, March 2025

"Black Women-Loving Women's Socio-Sexual Narratives." The Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand.

Presenter, October 2024

"Black Women-Loving Women's Socio-Sexual Narratives." The Association of Black Sexologists and Clinicians, 2024 ABSC International Lecture Series, Saint George's, Grenada.

Brown Bag Presenter, January 2024

"Black Women-Loving Women's Socio-Sexual Narratives." Spring 2024 Brown Bag, University of South Florida, Tampa, Fla.