CSWS played an active community role in celebrating Women’s History Month in March by sending UO graduate students and professors into the Eugene School District 4J classrooms. The scholars spoke to the 2010 theme of the National Women’s History Project, “Writing Women Back Into History.” A team of CSWS scholars selected the graduate student presenters from a pool of applicants.

Made possible by the gift of Madge and Val Lorwin, the inaugural Lorwin Lectureship will focus on Women’s Rights in a Global World. But who were the Lorwins? A conversation with UO history professor George Sheridan.

Q: You taught in the same department as Val Lorwin. How well did you know Val and Madge Lorwin?

Val interviewed me. I am Val’s successor in his job. I went there in 1976. I moved into their place, I think it was 1978. And then I stayed there until I got married, which was in 1986. So I was there through all that time.

A cultural anthropologist, CSWS’s new associate director researches women’s lives in global Asia.

Q: Tell us about growing up in Bangladesh. Who shaped your early views on feminism?

A conversation with Rebecca Wanzo about pop culture, comics, race and gender, the arc of narrative, reading for pleasure, social activism, etc.

Q: You teach classes on literature, popular culture, feminist theory and social activism. You have a Ph.D. in English and certificates in Women’s Studies and African American Studies. You are weaving together many strands. Scholar, teacher, and activist are some of the titles that emerge. How would you describe your interests?

by Yvonne Braun, Assistant Professor

by Priscilla Yamin, Assistant Professor, Political Science

As a sociology graduate student, Shannon Elizabeth Bell displayed an activist’s heart. In her first grant application to CSWS, Bell noted that women are at the fore of the anti-coal movement in central Appalachia, stepping out of their traditional gender roles to take an active leadership position in fighting the coal industry. Her scholarship had a mission—to help these women in low income coal-mining areas of West Virginia find more effective ways to use their voices through grassroots action.

by Alisa Freedman, Assistant Professor of Japanese Literature and Film

As the first recipient of the $1,000 Jane Higdon Scholarship, senior AlexAnn Westlake earned support for her research on birthing choices in Chile.

It’s hard to imagine that the UO Center for the Study of Women in Society could have found a more appropriate recipient of the first Jane Higdon Senior Thesis Scholarship than Alex Ann Westlake.

In 2008, CSWS was awarded a Ford Foundation grant from the National Council for Research on Women for “Diversifying the Leadership” of CSWS by promoting the leadership of women of color from historically underrepresented groups in the United States. Coordinated by then newly-tenured associate professor Lynn Fujiwara, “Women of Color, Borders, and Power: Mentoring and Leadership Development” involved ten women of color junior faculty from a broad range of disciplines in a yearlong project designed around mentorship, leadership development, and academic success.

Peggy Pascoe, whose research and teaching focused on the history of race, gender and sexuality, was the Beekman Professor of Northwest and Pacific History and professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Oregon. With family and friends at her side, she died from ovarian cancer on July 23, 2010, at home in Eugene, Oregon.