Research

A Vibrant Research Community

 

At the CSWS New Faculty Welcome, University of Oregon faculty affiliates speak about the impact CSWS has had on their careers and research over the years.

 

 

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Faculty Research

Karen Guillemin (left) is a biology professor who studies the microbial communities that make up each and every organism.

Guillemin named as 'Emerging Inventor'

From Oregon News — CSWS affiliate Karen Guillemin, Biology, has been named to the National Academy of Inventors, a designation that recognizes visionaries and innovators whose technologies brought, or aspire to bring, a real impact on society.

Graduate Research

Annie Ring, PhD Candidate, Department of Philosophy

White Women’s Linguistic Terrorism

by Annie Ring, PhD Candidate, Department of Philosophy 

J.L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words demonstrates that language is not just descriptive but in some cases is performative. That is, Austin’s speech act theory argues that language itself performs, changes, or does things in the world. Speech act theory classically considered institutions like marriage, where a pronouncement weds people into a legally binding relation, or boat christening, where naming and blessing a boat before the maiden voyage protects its passengers (Austin).

Undergraduate Research

Graphic illustration.

Feb. 12 info session for new CSWS undergraduate fellowship

An info session will be held 3 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 12, in 330 Hendricks (CSWS Jane Grant Room) for students and advisors interested in applying to the 2025 CSWS Undergraduate STEAM Summer Fellowship.

Launching this year with funding from our 50th anniversary Duckfunder campaign, the new fellowship is intended to create opportunities for cross disciplinary collaborations among science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM) faculty and students on campus and to enhance pathways for underrepresented students in STEAM to succeed.

Spotlight

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CSWS Launches New Faculty Grants

For AY 2026-27, the Center for the Study of Women in Society (CSWS) is launching a new research fellowship that provides University of Oregon faculty with one course release for a term of reduced or no teaching to pursue work on any aspect of the study of women and/or gender.

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Jina Kim

CSWS Spotlight: Jina Kim on 2024 Nobel Laureate Han Kang

In this interview, Jina Kim, associate professor of Korean literature and culture at the University of Oregon, discusses the Korean writer Han Kang who was the first Asian woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024.

 

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Michael Kuhn

CSWS Spotlight: Michael Kuhn on 2023 Nobel Laureate Claudia Goldin

In 2023, Harvard Professor Claudia Dale Goldin was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences "for having advanced our understanding of women's labor market outcomes." The third woman to win the award, she was the first to win the award solo. Michael Kuhn, an associate professor of economics at the University of Oregon, spoke with CSWS about the role of gender in his research and the significance of Dr. Goldin's work in the field of economics.

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CSWS Research Grant Fellows

The cover of Maya Gonzalez's picture book, "When a Bully is President: Truth and Creativity for Oppressive Times"

Illustrating Resilience: Children’s Picture Books for Oppressive Times

How might children’s literature help us respond to our current political climate? While all literature is politically (or at the very least, ideologically) motivated, a picture book that exemplifies political content for children is Maya Gonzalez’s When a Bully is President: Truth and Creativity for Oppressive Times. Not only is it an indirect comment on Trump but it also reframes US history through bully discourse in its reflections on colonization, slavery, war, and xenophobia. When read as political texts, picture books have the potential to inspire collective action or activism.
Min Young Park, PhD Candidate, Department of English

Tempting Bad Taste: Unreading the Failure of Art, Fashion, and Food in Late Modernist Novels

by Min Young Park, PhD Candidate, Department of English

Nella Larsen’s Quicksand opens with a vivid portrait of Helga Crane’s room. It is brimming with furniture and garments of her “rare and intensely personal taste” (1). The emphasis on the privacy of her taste is easily overlooked as it is soon followed by a disturbing remark by a white priest who claims that “Naxos Negroes…had good taste” because “[t]hey knew enough to stay in their place” (3)...

W. Jamie Yang, PhD Candidate, Department of Sociology

A Queer Quantitative Inquiry: Sexual Injustices and Social Contexts

My dissertation builds on a stance that views pleasure and safety as fundamental human rights. I am motivated by a wish to democratize pleasure for all, and specifically the questions, “What prohibits individuals from fully enjoying the sexual aspect of their humanity,” and “When it comes to sexual encounters, why do some groups of people consistently have a better and easier time than others?” I use critical feminist theory and queer quantitative methodology to examine how social contexts influence young adults’ experience with sexual injustices and sexual victimization.
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CSWS Faculty Affiliate Research

Black Pro Se, by Faith Barter

Black Pro Se: Authorship and the Limits of Law in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature

"Black thinkers in the antebellum United States grappled with what it meant to inhabit a place, a history, and a violent legal regime. In newspapers and pamphlets, political speeches, and fiction, Black writers persistently imagined alternative and liberatory legal futures. In reading these writers as architects of legal possibility, Faith Barter mobilizes the coincidental intimacy of prose and the legal term pro se, which refers to litigants who represent themselves in court. The book studies multiple literary genres—short stories, novels, freedom narratives, speeches, confessions, periodicals, and pamphlets—alongside legal historical treatises, trial transcripts, judicial opinions, and statutes."
Author
Faith Barter
Publication
2025
Cover of "Accompaniment with Im/migrant Communities: Engaged Ethnography"

Accompaniment with Im/migrant Communities: Engaged Ethnography

"This collection brings together the experiences and voices of anthropologists whose engaged work with im/ migrant communities pushes the boundaries of ethnography toward a feminist, care-based, decolonial mode of ethnographic engagement called ‘accompaniment.’ Accompaniment as anthropological research and praxis troubles the boundaries of researcher-participant, scholaractivist, and academic-community to explicitly address issues of power, inequality, and the broader social purpose of the work. More than two dozen contributors show how accompaniment is not merely a mode of knowledge production but an ethical commitment that calls researchers to action in solidarity with those whose lives we seek to understand."
Author
Kristen E. Yarris
Whitney L. Duncan
Publication
2024
Cover of "California Medieval: Nearly a Nun in 1960s San Francisco"

California Medieval: Nearly a Nun in 1960s San Francisco

"California Medieval is an intriguing hybrid memoir, interspersed with poetry, song, and lyrical vignettes. It explores the world of a Franciscan convent during the heyday of the 1960s in San Francisco at the birth of the flower-power era, as seen through the eyes of a novitiate nun, newly arrived in the Bay Area from a rural community in southwestern Washington State. This book is a stylistically and structurally adventurous narrative that forms a literary intersection of music, spirituality, nature, sociology, and sexuality."
Author
Dianne Dugaw
Publication
2024
Cover of "The Edinburgh Companion to Women in Publishing"

The Edinburgh Companion to Women in Publishing, 1900–2020

"Women’s creative labour in publishing has often been overlooked. This book draws on dynamic new work in feminist book history and publishing studies to offer the first comparative collection exploring women’s diverse, deeply embedded work in modern publishing. Highlighting the value of networks, collaboration, and archives, the companion sets out new ways of reading women’s contributions to the production and circulation of global print cultures."
Author
Helen Southworth
Publication
2024
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CSWS Guest Speaker Interviews

CSWS Presents: Moira Fradinger

CSWS spoke with Moira Fradinger, Associate Professor in the Comparative Literature department at Yale University on the occasion of her talk "A Decolonial Reading: The Case of Latin American Antígonas" on October 18, 2024 at the University of Oregon. The event was presented by the Center for the Study of Women in Society and the Department of Romance Languages, and cosponsored by Center for Latino and Latin American Studies, Oregon Humanities Center, Theater, and Comparative Literature.

CSWS Presents: Darshana Mini

Darshana Mini is an assistant professor in communications arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and recently published the book "Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India" (2024). She presented her talk "Madakarani as Screen Pleasure: Scandal and Soft-Porn Imaginary" at the University of Oregon on October 25, 2024.

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