Women's History
Encountering Women’s History in a CSWS Calderwood Seminar
In the Jane Grant Room at CSWS, a dozen students gather around the conference table as their instructor gets the workshop started. This week, classmates in group A are the editors, providing detailed critical and generative feedback to the op-ed writers in group B. Next week, their roles will be reversed.
Undergraduate Initiatives
CSWS Launches Fundraiser to Support New Undergraduate Initiatives
Calderwood Seminars: Student Work
Shane Rose: HIST 416, Spring 2025
In about two weeks I will be graduating from the University of Oregon. It took eleven years to get to this point, registering in 2014. I’m certain it isn’t a record for the longest enrollment period as an undergrad, but it is still a rather long time. I’m proud of myself and my accomplishments, sure, but I do have one regret. I wasn’t a Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies major. I wanted to be one, as the subject matter deeply impacted who I am as a person and my trajectory in life, but Veteran’s Affairs policy actively prevented me from doing so. I wish to explain both aspects to you.
Shaelyn Thomas: HIST 416, Spring 2025
Two out of every three people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in the United States are women. While this has been commonly explained by women’s slightly longer lifespans, many researchers have been dissatisfied with that conclusion. It does not explain why Black women are disproportionately affected, or why certain geographic locations show a higher disparity of diagnoses. Nor does it show why there is growing evidence that women are still disproportionately underdiagnosed with Alzheimer’s, suggesting an even higher disparity in cases compared to less than five years difference in lifespan.
Lash Eversole: HIST 416, Spring 2025
We look at the world around us and the remarkable things we can do at speeds people only dreamed about in a not so far past, and when we look at who was awarded and given credit to these great advancements, we see a long list of men with little to no mention of the women who made these achievements possible. It is a brutal and saddening truth how many wondrous minds and their work have been suppressed by men, but it's well past time these women are brought into the limelight and given credit and praise, even after death.
About: Calderwood Seminars in Public Writing
In Calderwood Seminars, students learn to translate complex arguments and professional jargon in order to make their writing accessible and interesting to a broad audience.
These small seminars employ active learning and are designed around short writing assignments that might appear in a blog, magazine, newspaper, or other media outlet. Students revisit knowledge acquired in other courses and shape it for general readers, producing Academic Minutes, book and film reviews, interviews and profiles, op-eds, and other forms of public writing. Course mechanics involve a weekly rhythm of outside-of-class peer editing, in-class workshopping, and delivery of multiple drafts. Students rotate each week between the roles of editor and writer. The skills they teach should be central to a liberal arts education as they are important to life beyond college.