CSWS Annual Review

Over the course of ten days, Anthony Schrag and Marjorie Celona (pictured left) created several works from Edie X.’s career at the Out of the Blue Drill Hall in Edinburgh / photo provided Celona.

Finding Edie X. A Writer Explores Gender, Motherhood, and Disability through Art

by Jori Celona, Associate Professor, Creative Writing Program
My third novel, The Year of X, begins with Edie X., a mid-career artist, leaving her husband to attend a yearlong artist residency in upstate New York, bringing her young daughter, Lou, along for the ride. Her proposed project is a reimagining of Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, in which she plans to document her own top surgery in a series of photographs. But shortly after arriving at the residency, she begins to have bizarre seizures, which hijack her life and art, and alter her sense of personhood in the world.
A collage of Miriam M. Johnson among 5 of her paintings that were donated to the CSWS.

Johnson Paintings Gifted to CSWS

CSWS is honored to have the paintings of sociologist and CSWS co-founder Miriam M. Johnson (1928–2007), who was known as Mimi by her friends and colleagues, on view throughout our offices in Hendricks Hall. The paintings were donated to the Center after the passing of Mimi’s husband, Ben Johnson, in 2024.
Panelists for the “Gender as Target” event were, from left, Anita Chari, Alison Gash, Kaito Campos de Novais, and Brennan Fitzgerald / photo by Cing Dim

Gender as Target: US 2024 Elections and Aftermath

On Feb. 28, 2025, CSWS hosted “Gender as Target: US 2024 Elections and Aftermath,” a teach-in featuring University of Oregon faculty and Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation (GTFF) representatives discussing how gender and race discourses informed the 2024 election cycle and ways we can collectively respond to the barrage of policies impacting immigrant and LGBTQ+ communities today.
The 2025 CSWS-OVPRI Undergraduate Steam Summer Fellows are, from left, Cing Dim, Sophia Foerster, Anisha Srinivasan, and Alex Underwood / photos provided by the fellows.

Personal Stories Inspire Summer Undergraduate Research Projects

by Jenée Wilde, Associate Teaching Professor, Department of English
The Center for the Study of Women in Society has launched a new student-centered research initiative—the CSWS Undergraduate STEAM Summer Fellowship. Over the summer, undergraduate fellows collaborated with University of Oregon faculty mentors to develop interdisciplinary research and creative projects that engage with STEAM fields—science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics. Our STEAM fellows approach their inquiry with gender and intersectionality as an analytical framework.
Sitting around the CSWS Jane Grant Room conference table, students offer both generative and critical feedback on their op-ed assignment drafts in the HIST 416 Calderwood Seminar last spring / photo by Owen Garvey.

Encountering Women’s History in a CSWS Calderwood Seminar

by Jenée Wilde, Associate Teaching Professor, Department of English
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.
Former CSWS director Michelle McKinley (left) and Sangita Gopal, CSWS director (right)

A Year in Review: 2024-2025

The 50th Anniversary celebrations of the Center for the Study of Women and Society committed to supporting research and creative practice that envisioned Feminist Futures. This charge has become ever more urgent this past year as we seem to be living now in a fight or flight mode, where each day a new crisis hijacks our attention and energies. In 2023, for instance, the wage gap for women widened after two decades. The fight to reverse this loss shrinks our capacity to work towards closing that gap, or to address how women of color make substantially less than 84 cents to the dollar...
2025 Annual Review cover

2025 Annual Review

  • A Year in Review by Sangita Gopal, Associate Professor, Department of Cinema Studies
  • Encountering Women's History in a CSWS Calderwood Seminar by Jenée Wilde, Associate Teaching Professor, Department of English
  • Personal Stories Inspire Summer Undergraduate Research Projects by Jenée Wilde, Associate Teaching Professor, Department of English
  • Multimedia Spotlight
  • Gender as Target: US 2024 Elections and Aftermath reflections by Sofia Vicente–Vidal, Liesl Cohn De León, and Vasil A. Arangelov
Publication Year
2025
2025 Annual Review
Peggy Pascoe, Oct. 18, 1954–July 23, 2010

In Memoriam: Peggy Pascoe

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.

Shannon Bell, front center, with the Harts Photovoice Group at their exhibit in West Virginia, April 2009.

Photovoice in the Appalachian Coalfields

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.

AlexAnn Westlake on a bicycle trip in Peru (photo courtesty of Oregon Community Foundation).

A New Scholarship for Undergraduates

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.

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