Experts

Mazaris is the founding director of the LGBTQ Center at Wake Forest University, where they also teach in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program. They provide education, advocacy, and support to the campus community around issues of gender identity and sexual orientation and serves on Wake Forest’s diversity and inclusion leadership team. Since the passage of North Carolina House Bill 2 (HB2), they have provided expert commentary for a wide range of national and regional media outlets including Fox News, Charlotte Observer, WFDD, The Advocate and the Winston-Salem Journal.

Mazaris’ teaching and research focus on LGBTQ history, queer theory, public history, and gender studies. While at Brown, they held a Jacob Javits Fellowship from the U.S. Department of Education and served as the first Coordinator of the LGBTQ Resource Center. Before coming to Wake Forest, Mazaris served as a Presidential Management Fellow at the Internal Revenue Service and the National Park Service, where they developed agency-wide inclusion and diversity initiatives and prepared policy recommendations. At the IRS, the oversaw a special emphasis program for LGBTQ issues – a first for the agency.