Stoller, Nancy E.

Biographical Information

Nancy Elaine Stoller was born in 1942 in Newport News, Virginia. In 1960 she left Virginia to attend Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, where she earned an A.B. in Philosophy in 1963. She went on to earn her M.A. (1965) and Ph.D. (1972) in Sociology from Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. From 1978-1980 she was a Post-doctoral fellow at Yale University. Stoller started her job at University of California (UC) Santa Cruz in 1973 and received tenure in 1987 after having filed a gender discrimination suit against the University. Stoller worked and published under her married name, Nancy Shaw, for many years before reclaiming Stoller in the 1990s. Along with her work on AIDS, Stoller's research has focused on women, prisoners, and health care.

Stoller became involved with the civil rights movement during her first year of college. She was involved in local actions in Wellesley and Boston during the school year and worked with the Washington D.CIRCA area Non-violent Action Group (DC-NAG) during the summer. Later she became involved with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and did organizing work in Maryland and Arkansas. Her activism continued throughout her life. In a recent, short, online biography she states: I have been involved in various social change movements: anti-racism, feminism, anti-apartheid work, queer organizing, women's health activism, working on changing prison conditions, prison abolition, and so on.

After a brief marriage to Kevin (Kwame) Shaw (1966-1972) and the birth of her daughter, Gwendolyn, in 1968, Stoller came out as a lesbian. She was one of the first openly lesbian professors at UC Santa Cruz (UCSC) and was outed internationally during her tenure fight.

Between her dismissal from UC Santa Cruz in 1984 and her reinstatement in 1987, Stoller worked as the Women's Program Development Director within the Education Department of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation (SFAF) from 1984 to 1987. While there she was involved with a number of projects including heterosexual focus groups, the drafting of a number of pamphlets, and the organization of women's support groups. This work led to further interactions with a variety of community based AIDS organizations. She did a formal participant/observer study of the New York City ACT-UP chapter in the fall/winter of 1989. She went to meetings and demonstrations, including the St. Patrick's Cathedral demonstration held in the December of that year.

Stoller also spent significant time working with Cal-PEP, the California Prostitutes Education Project, an AIDS prevention and education organization founded and run by prostitutes and former prostitutes to prevent the spread of AIDS within that community. Stoller served as an advisor to the Executive Director of the organization, as well as doing a stint on the Board of Directors. Other groups that she had contact with during this period include: Prevention Point, a Needle Exchange program working with Intravenous (IV) Drug Users; the Women's AIDS Network (WAN), and Women's AIDS Risk Network (WARN).

Stoller translated her experience working for SFAF and her interest in other AIDS related community organizations into two books on AIDS - Lessons from the Damned: Queers, Whores and Junkies Respond to AIDS published in 1998 and Women Resisting AIDS: Feminist Strategies of Empowerment (1995) co-edited by Stoller with Beth E. Schneider of UC Santa Barbara. Stoller wrote the chapter on "Lesbian Involvement in the AIDS Epidemic: Changing Roles and Generational Differences" in Women Resisting AIDS After returning to the UCSC campus she has taught classes in Transgressive Sexualities and Genders, Health and Human Rights in Prison, and Theory and Practice of Sexual Politics. The majority of Stoller's ongoing research has been into the treatment of women prisoners, especially in relation to medical care. She was also involved in an outreach study on breast cancer in the Latina community. As of 2005 Stoller is still teaching at UCSC and living in San Francisco.