Kim Vaz
Associate Professor (on research leave 2009-2010)
Contact
Office: FAO 014
Phone: 813/974-0985
Email:
Links
Bio
Kim Vaz, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Women's Studies at The University of South Florida and a faculty member of the Tampa Bay Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies. Her areas of scholarship include: Feminist Psychology; Mental Health Counseling, the Psychology of Black Women/Women of Color; Psychology and Race; the Art of Yoruba Women, and Women's Studies' Activism. Dr. Vaz is author of The woman with the artistic brush: A life history of Yoruba batik artist, Nike Davies, from M.S. Sharpe Publications (1997), and editor of Black women in America (1995) and Oral narrative research with Black women (1997), both from Sage Publications. She has published Many Floridas: Women Envisioning Change (with Rhonda Ovist, Judy Hayden, Sharon Masters, 2007 from Cambridge Scholars Publishing) and Florida without Borders: Women at the Intersections of the Local and Global (with Judy Hayden and Sharon Masters) and Benefiting by Design: Women of Color in Feminist Psychological Research (with Chemba Raghavan and Arlene E. Edwards) both from Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Vaz is the founder of the Florida Consortium for Women's and Gender Studies.
Dr. Vaz's research has introduced new paradigms into the clinical conceptualizations of treating women of color in mental health settings, through her incorporation of approaches drawn from African indigenous epistemological traditions. Her work demonstrates how Yoruba religion can recast and reframe ways of thinking about common emotional problems. In the area of the psychology of women, the concepts of 'racial aliterarcy' and 'diversity-mindedness' have become foundational. Her work on multicultural feminist perspectives in the academy has been used to analyze issues of the influence of race and gender in the professorial work-environment for African Americans in higher education and on women of color as students in higher education; as well as to understand how continuing discrimination in the academic workplace and society in general, present problems for African and African American women that curtail and undermine their contributions, their history, their relationships within higher education.