Jennifer Freyd, UO Department of Psychology

Psychology professor Jennifer Freyd’s paper “Exposure to Betrayal Trauma and Risks to the Well-Being of Girls and Women” is now available online in the Fall 2009 issue of CSWS Research Matters.

“Women are diagnosed with a host of mental health problems, including depression, anxiety and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) more often than men,” Freyd writes. Her article explores the “whys.” Click here to access a PDF of Freyd’s article.

Freyd is the breakthrough researcher who developed Betrayal Trauma Theory. She is the author of the award-winning book Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse (1996) and numerous other publications. See her website for more information. CSWS has supported Freyd’s work through faculty research grants.

Mary Rothbart

UO developmental psychologist Mary K. Rothbart received two significant awards in 2009, the Gold Medal for Life Achievement in the Science of Psychology from the American Psychological Foundation, and the Distinguished Scientific Contribution to Child Development Award from the Society for Research in Child Development. Dr. Rothbart is a distinguished professor emerita of psychology and one of the founding members of the Center for the Study of Women in Society.

This description of her work comes from the UO Department of Psychology website: “Dr. Rothbart studies the development of individual differences in temperament using methods that range from questionnaire to laboratory observations. She has developed parent- and self-report questionnaires for assessing temperament in infancy, childhood, early adolescence, and adulthood. She has also developed standardized laboratory assessments of temperament, and she has done extensive laboratory work on the early development of the emotions, activity, and attention.”

CSWS supported Dr. Rothbart’s work with several faculty research grants during the 1980s. “My work greatly benefited from the CSWS support,” she said. Read more about Dr. Rothbart and her work in InsideOregon.

Peggy Pascoe

Peggy Pascoe, UO professor of history, continues to win honors for her book, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America.  After winning two of the major annual prizes from the Organization of American Historians earlier this year, she has repeated this feat. Pascoe learned in mid-October that she is the winner of two of the major annual prizes given by the American Historical Association. They are the John H. Dunning Prize, given for the best book in U.S. history (any field, any period) and the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize in Women’s History. The award ceremony will take place at the annual meeting of the AHA in January in San Diego. Pascoe is a CSWS faculty affiliate. Read more at InsideOregon.

Authors Barbara Pope and Debra Gwartney, both of whom have been involved with CSWS over the years, were among the finalists of the 2009 Oregon Book Awards. Barbara Pope, UO professor emerita and founding director of what was then called women’s studies, was nominated in the fiction category for the murder mystery Cezanne’s Quarry (Pegasus Books).  She is currently at work on a second novel.

Debra Gwartney, dissemination specialist for CSWS from 2005-2006 and currently assistant professor of English at Portland State University, was nominated in the creative nonfiction category for Live Through This: A Mother’s Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

Actress Amami Yuki (left) accepts an award for helping to popularize “Ara-fo.”

by Alisa Freedman, Assistant Professor of Japanese Literature and Film

Editor’s Note: In 2009, Professor Freedman received a CSWS Faculty Research Grant of nearly $4,000 to support her research in Japan. On October 28, she will offer a CSWS Noon Talk in the Jane Grant Room, Hendricks Hall, to discuss her research.

Thanks to the help of a CSWS grant, I spent the summer in Tokyo, conducting research for my books on changing images of workingwomen on Japanese television, Modern Girls in Motion: Gender, Mobility, and Labor in Japan, and Tokyo in Transit: Japanese Culture on the Rails and Road. In general, my interdisciplinary work explores how the city shapes culture and psychology, giving rise to gender roles that characterize Japan. My research takes two forms. The first involves analyzing stories—those told in literature, television, journalism, cinema, and other popular media—that capture Japanese women’s experiences in a creative and thought-provoking way. The second entails wandering Tokyo to observe patterns of daily life and dominant trends and pondering the reasons behind them.

UO law professor Michelle McKinley

University of Oregon law professor Michelle McKinley has been awarded a Newberry Library Short-Term Resident Fellowship for Individual Research for her work-in-progress titled “Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Legal Activism, and Ecclesiastical Courts in Colonial Lima, 1593-1700.”

A member of the CSWS Women of Color Junior Faculty Project, McKinley began teaching at the UO in 2007. She is researching legal actions taken by  female slaves to achieve formal emancipation in 17th-century Peru. The fellowship supports her scholarship at the Newberry Library collection in Chicago. Speaking to the Oregon Daily Emerald student newspaper, McKinley commented: “I want people to look at the experience of slavery in a more nuanced and historically accurate way. I want to look at the ways that law can be used for social justice and as a means of repression, all during which I would like to make a contribution to Afro-Peruvian history.“