Faculty Research Grant

This young woman is wearing bridal finery and is announcing her pending marriage.

Women in Papua New Guinea: Gendered Transformations in the Ipili Mining Era

by Aletta Biersack, Professor, Department of Anthropology
Between late March and the end of July 2015, I resumed my research on gender in the Porgera and Paiela valleys of Enga Province, Papua New Guinea (PNG). PNG achieved independence from Australia in 1975. Gold has been mined in the Porgera valley since the mid-1940s, but it was not until 1990, when hard rock mining operations replaced alluvial mining, that these two valleys underwent rapid change. I went to PNG to see for myself what had changed. I was especially interested in impacts on women.
Movie poster for Princess Ka‘iulani (2009)

The Afterlife of Princess Ka‘iulani

by Stephanie Teves, Assistant Professor, Departments of Ethnic Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies
Acting as a subtle form of resistance to settler colonialism, a film and play about a Hawaiian Kingdom princess who died more than a hundred years ago allows Native Hawaiians to honor Ka‘iulani by thinking about her life and that of the Kingdom critically.
Tití (L) and Neus Catalá, after their liberation from the Nazi camp at Ravensbruck / BDIC.

Voices of the Vanquished: Spanish Women on the Left between Franco and Hitler

by Gina Herrmann, Associate Professor of Spanish, Romance Languages
On April 14, 1945, the very day the Allied troops liberated the Ravensbrück Nazi camp for women, inmate 43225, Mercedes Núñez Targa (1911-1986), had been slated for transport to the camp gas chamber. Núñez Targa’s route to Ravensbrück had begun in 1931 with the declaration of Spain’s progressive Second Republic. Mobilized in youth organizations along with hundreds of thousands of women who supported the Republic, Núñez Targa eventually took up a post as the head of the Spanish Communist Party in her native region of Galicia.
Cover page of Micah Bazant’s TimTum—A Trans Jew Zine (1999) / image provided by Miriam Chorley-Schulz

A Queer History of Yiddish

by Miriam Chorley-Schulz, Assistant Professor, German and Scandinavian Studies
In their zine TimTum—A Trans Jew Zine (1999), Micah Bazant introduced an affirmative layer to the history of who is referred to in Yiddish as timtum (or tumtem). According to Bazant, a timtum is “a sexy, smart, creative, productive Jewish genderqueer.” This was not always the case.
Anthony Schrag and Marjorie Celona (pictured left) created several works from Edie X.’s career at the Out of the Blue Drill Hall in Edinburgh.

Finding Edie X. A Writer Explores Gender, Motherhood, and Disability through Art

by Jori Celona, Associate Professor, Creative Writing Program
My third novel, The Year of X, begins with Edie X., a mid-career artist, leaving her husband to attend a yearlong artist residency in upstate New York, bringing her young daughter, Lou, along for the ride. Her proposed project is a reimagining of Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, in which she plans to document her own top surgery in a series of photographs. But shortly after arriving at the residency, she begins to have bizarre seizures, which hijack her life and art, and alter her sense of personhood in the world.
Courtney Thorsson

Revolutionary Foodways: a Set of Paths and Practices

by Courtney Thorsson, Assistant Professor, UO Department of English

My first book, Women’s Work: Nationalism and Contemporary African American Women’s Novels, has one chapter on cooking as a practice of nationalism in the works of poet, playwright, and novelist Ntozake Shange. When that chapter became twice as long as any other, I realized I had a second project on my hands and began compiling the notes and stacks of books that became the skeleton for my new project, Revolutionary Recipes: Foodways and African American Literature.

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