2013 Annual Review

40th Special Section: Feminist Futures 

Research & Columns

Highlights from the Academic Year

Looking at Books

Publication Year
2013

Articles

Articles
Science fiction is one of Carol Stabile’s areas of research. She will be teaching a course on feminist science fiction during AY 2013-14 / photo by Alice Evans.

Funding Feminist Futures

by Carol Stabile, Director , Center for the Study of Women in Society, Professor, UO School of Journalism and Communication and the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies

Jane Grant and William Harris in their later years together / courtesy of the Jane Grant Photograph Collection, PH141, UO Libraries Special Collection.

For Love of a Feminist: Jane Grant, William Harris, and the “Fund for the Study of Women”

In 1975, retired financial analyst and Fortune editor William B. Harris willed most of his estate to establish the “University of Oregon Fund for the Study of Women.” By the end of 1984, the sum of his endowment amounted to just over $4 million, the largest single gift the university had ever received.1 At a time when women’s studies was struggling to gain ground in the academy, what led Harris to fund research on women? The story of the Center for the Study of Women in Society’s greatest benefactor begins and ends with his love of a feminist, Jane C. Grant.
Poster for the "Agents of Change" documentary showing

Celebrating Forty Years: Anniversary Event to Showcase Feminist Research, Teaching, and Activism

by Jenée Wilde, PhD candidate, UO Department of English (Folklore)

1973—More than thirty University Feminists loudly take over the steps of Johnson Hall to demand services for women on campus. The Oregon State Board of Higher Education signs off on the state’s first women’s studies program at University of Oregon. A librarian searches out the papers of early feminist Jane C. Grant for UO Library’s Special Collections. And a small core of faculty creates the Center for the Sociological Study of Women (CSSW) to support feminist research on campus. 

Áine Duggan

Research Can Serve as the Anchor for Feminism’s Future

by Áine Duggan, President, National Council on Research for Women

The future of feminism may be over sooner than we think. So goes talk in the public sphere and blogosphere about how celebrities-du-jour and political women alike are running in horror away from the “F” word. You would think the feminist waves were a plague on all our houses. (Curiously, some of their male counterparts are embracing the word; see Patrick Stewart and Dr. Jackson Katz.) 

Shannon Elizabeth Bell, front center, with Harts Photovoice Group at their 2009 exhibit in West Virginia. Bell served as a bridge to help women she studied bring forward their stories about devastation to their community by the coal industry.

Activist Research and the Fight Against the Polluter-Industrial Complex

by Shannon Elizabeth Bell, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Kentucky

The future I hope to see for feminist research is more scholars engaging in activist research aimed at fighting the tremendous number of environmental injustices that are devastating the lives of women and other vulnerable populations around the world. 

Maggie Evans

Is Feminist Poetry a Thing of the Past?

by Maggie Evans, PhD graduate, , UO Department of English

Tasked with composing a short riff on the future of feminist research in American poetics, I set out, naturally, for the library, determined to explore a few beginning questions that sprang to mind. Among them: How do contemporary women poets enact or represent feminism(s) in their poetry? How have the changing political and social goals of feminism affected the thematic and formal choices of feminist writers? How do feminist writers depict or imagine the future? Library, here I come!

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.