UO scholar and CSWS Executive Committee member Louise Bishop explores the healing power of words in her recent book, Words, Stones & Herbs (Syracuse University Press).  In a presentation sponsored by the CSWS Healing Arts Research Interest Group, Bishop will talk about her book, which looks at the role of word and gender in healing, healing and the vernacular, and other aspects of poetry, language and metaphor in the healing arts of medieval and early modern England.

Louise Bishop is associate professor of literature and associate dean, Clark Honors College.

Place: Center for the Study of Women in Society

330 Hendricks Hall

Jane Grant Conference Room

Professor Bishop will trace the medical, theological, and popular uses of noli me tangere, “touch me not,” to situate and unmoor the phrase from its place on a remedybook’s page.  She  argues for a discursive relationship—highly material, eminently bodied, fully social, narratively pious, complexly gendered—between the disease name as it appears in a remedybook and the cultural resonances afforded by the phrase’s Biblical echo.  A Latin phrase can take on a range of meanings in vernacular contexts. Catching the shadow of Mary Magdalene, patron saint of apothecaries, in Bodley 591’s recipe opens a space for other ways to read and contextualize Middle English remedybooks.  Read in this fashion, the phrase noli me tangere enacts one of Rubin’s “creative moments” that “allows us to touch medieval bodies” (Miri Rubin) that were themselves touched by reading that heals.

Read the story about Professor Bishop in the Daily Emerald.

Joan Acker is one of eight people who will be honored during Lane County’s Sixth Annual Older Americans Month celebration on May 6. The theme this year is “Lane County Honors Older Americans Who Capture the Spirit of Oregon.” Following is the nomination letter submitted by the Center for the Study of Women in Society.

Joan Acker

by Carol Stabile, Director, CSWS

In order to understand how Professor Joan Acker embodies Oregon’s pioneering spirit, one would first have to understand the grounds upon which Joan herself might object to the stories we typically tell about pioneers and the motivations that led them west. For a woman and a feminist to succeed in the university in the 1960s, at a time when female PhDs and professors were the exception rather than the rule, she needed the kind of determination and hard work we typically associate with pioneers. But Joan’s career and activism were not based on a belief in individualism and isolated success—she did not work in order to stake out acreage for herself and people who looked like her. Instead, Joan has consistently worked to create a climate in which diversity is valued, and where differences that make our communities so rich and exciting are cause for inclusion and celebration, rather than for exclusion and the establishment of communities that flourish at the expense of others. Unlike the statue of the Pioneer Woman on the University of Oregon campus, so near to the Center for the Study of Women in Society that Joan helped to establish, Joan Acker is no demure founding mother, but a true pioneer who has taken on challenges directly, with great passion, dedication, and principle.