CSWS Annual Review

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 Priscilla Yamin, Assistant Professor, Political Science

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?

by Yvonne Braun, Assistant Professor

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.

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.

by Katie Rodgers, Graduate Student, Sociology

by Maggie Evans, PhD candidate, Department of English

The final lines of Marge Piercy’s “The Woman in the Ordinary” exemplify a familiar strain of contemporary American women’s poetry:

In her bottled up is a woman peppery as curry,

a yam of a woman of butter and brass,

compounded of acid and sweet like a pineapple,

like a handgrenade set to explode,

like goldenrod ready to bloom. 

by Laura Massengale, MA, Department of International Studies

by Karyn L. Lewis, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Psychology