Programming

CSWS Presents: Durba Mitra

On the occasion of her 2026 Acker-Morgen Lecture—"What If Gathering Together Liberated Us?"—Durba Mitra, Richard B. Wolf Associate Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University, sat down for an interview with CSWS Director Sangita Gopal to talk about her work as a historian and feminist scholar.

Student Opportunities

Undergraduate Initiatives

STEAM Fellow Anisha Srinivasan shows a research poster she created with funding from CSWS.
CSWS offers a variety of opportunities for undergraduate students to contribute to our mission and participate in the Center. Undergraduates can apply for summer research funding or sign up for a gender-focused Calderwood Seminar in Public Writing, as well as apply for internship and employment opportunities.

Research Interest Groups

Research Interest Groups

The RIG panel at the CSWS Alumni Symposium.
CSWS Research Interest Groups (RIGs) are collaborations among faculty members, staff, graduate students, and community members at the University of Oregon. A primary goal of our RIGs is to bring people together for a shared project, idea, or vision around CSWS’s mission: to generate, support, and publicize intersectional research on women and gender. UO faculty, graduate students (with a faculty advisor), or staff are eligible to apply for CSWS RIG funding.

Women of Color Project

Women of Color

Michelle McKinley is the current WOC coordinator.
The Women of Color (WOC) Project has been a special project under the auspices of CSWS since 2005. The program is comprised of tenure-track women faculty who represent all the colleges and schools within the UO. The group was initially formed to foster WOC in leadership positions in UO administration. It evolved over the years as a vital research, mentoring, and support network for WOC faculty who often find that they are the only one of their kind in their academic units and seek both mentorship and community from fellow colleagues. Learn more....

Women in the Northwest

Women in the Northwest

Former UO President Dave Frohnmayer with the late Mazie Giustina, whose endowment helps fund the CSWS research initiative Women in the Northwest.
In 1992, CSWS began our Women in the Northwest (WNW) research initiative, originally envisioned as a five-year project to promote and spotlight research on women’s lives in the Pacific Northwest. A series on Welfare and Policy was among the publications that came out of this project. In 1997, CSWS received a large private gift from Mazie Giustina, specifically endowing more work on women in the Northwest. Because of this expansion, a core group of researchers—largely from the social sciences, history, and the professional schools—developed ongoing research that linked theoretical, substantive, and policy concerns about women, work, families, economic restructuring, social policy, politics, and the law. Today CSWS continues to fund research focused on Women in the Northwest from the Giustina endowment.
Sangita Gopal speaking at a podium.

Director's Message: A Year in Review

CSWS Director Sangita Gopal discusses programming highlights from the past year in her column from the 2026 Annual Review.

A glowing star.

Programming Spotlight: Undergraduate Fellowships

Fundraising on the University of Oregon's 2026 annual day of giving surpassed our $5,000 goal to support our Undergraduate STEAM Summer Fellowships, which create opportunities for cross-disciplinary collaborations among science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM) faculty and students on campus. Read about our 2026 STEAM Fellows and what motivated their summer projects.

Highlights from CSWS Programming

The Collaboration Continuum

by Michael Hames-García, Director, CSWS; Professor, UO Department of Ethnic Studies

I am aware of the irony of writing a column by myself on collaborative scholarship. Most likely, any insights contained here would have been strengthened by the participation of others in the writing process. And yet, part of what I would like to say is that in some sense all scholarship is collaborative...

Collaboration Through Conversation: How CSWS Developed the Research Interest Group Model

by Jenée Wilde, PhD candidate, English

In 1994, the Center for the Study of Women in Society (CSWS) launched a bold new vision—to foster scholarly collaboration through research interest groups, or RIGs. While the center had primarily funded individual research in earlier decades, the RIG model was designed to support a variety of intellectual and social connections among scholars working on gender in broadly related fields. 

UO Guest Speaker Collaborations

CSWS Presents: Darshana Mini
CSWS Presents: Moira Fradinger
Interview with Literary Agent, Anjali Singh, and Comic Artist, Shay Mirk
Interview with Avant-Garde Feminist Filmmakers Su Friedrich and Gelare Khoshgozaran