CSWS is in our final year of sponsoring undergraduate Calderwood Seminars in Public Writing on gender-related topics across several departments at the University of Oregon.
With funding from the Calderwood Foundation, the Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation, and our donors, CSWS has collaborated on seminars with faculty from the departments of History, Comparative Literature, English, East Asian Languages and Literatures, and Women’s, Sexuality, and Gender Studies. The purpose of CSWS Calderwood Seminars is to train undergraduates to effectively communicate cross-disciplinary research on women and gender to the public.
Winter and Spring term seminars include the following:
WGS 407/507: Pop Feminisms: Celebrity, Representation, and Power, with Kemi Balogun (Winter 2027, Tuesdays 2–4:50, CRN 25195). How do celebrities shape public conversations about gender, race, sexuality, and social justice? This CSWS Calderwood Seminar examines celebrity culture as a lens for understanding representation, power, and popular feminisms in contemporary society. Students in this course will write for public audiences, connecting feminist ideas to current debates.
KRN 399: Love, Labor and Life Writing in Modern Korea, with Jina E. Kim (Spring 2027). How have Korean women narrated love, work, family, and identity in a rapidly changing modern world? This CSWS Calderwood Seminar explores women’s life writing alongside literature and film to examine questions of gender, beauty, labor, sexuality, and power. Through public-facing writing projects, students will learn to communicate humanistic insights to audiences beyond the classroom.
ENG 399: Speculative Fiction and Gender, with Jenée Wilde (Spring 2027). How can speculative stories help us think publicly about gender, power, and social change? This CSWS Calderwood Seminar examines how science fiction, fantasy, and horror literature and film make visible systems of gendered power in our world, and explores what futures become imaginable when we rethink gender norms. Students will consider why feminist speculative fiction matters in public discourse and learn to communicate insights through public-facing writing projects.
Past seminars have included COLT 399 Extreme Domesticity: The Labor of Care in Literary and Visual Culture, and HIST 416 Women and the Family in 20th Century America. You can watch videos and read student work from these courses on our website.