CSWS Annual Review

by Easther Chigumira, PhD candidate, UO Department of Geography

by Courtney Thorsson, Assistant Professor, UO Department of English

My first book, Women’s Work: Nationalism and Contemporary African American Women’s Novels, has one chapter on cooking as a practice of nationalism in the works of poet, playwright, and novelist Ntozake Shange. When that chapter became twice as long as any other, I realized I had a second project on my hands and began compiling the notes and stacks of books that became the skeleton for my new project, Revolutionary Recipes: Foodways and African American Literature.

by Maggie Evans, PhD graduate, , UO Department of English

Tasked with composing a short riff on the future of feminist research in American poetics, I set out, naturally, for the library, determined to explore a few beginning questions that sprang to mind. Among them: How do contemporary women poets enact or represent feminism(s) in their poetry? How have the changing political and social goals of feminism affected the thematic and formal choices of feminist writers? How do feminist writers depict or imagine the future? Library, here I come!

by Shannon Elizabeth Bell, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Kentucky

The future I hope to see for feminist research is more scholars engaging in activist research aimed at fighting the tremendous number of environmental injustices that are devastating the lives of women and other vulnerable populations around the world. 

by Miriam Deutsch, Professor, UO Department of Physics, Oregon Center for Optics

by Michael Hames-García, Professor, UO Department of Ethnic Studies

by Yvette Alex-Assensoh, Vice President for Equity and Inclusion, University of Oregon

by Áine Duggan, President, National Council on Research for Women

The future of feminism may be over sooner than we think. So goes talk in the public sphere and blogosphere about how celebrities-du-jour and political women alike are running in horror away from the “F” word. You would think the feminist waves were a plague on all our houses. (Curiously, some of their male counterparts are embracing the word; see Patrick Stewart and Dr. Jackson Katz.) 

by Jenée Wilde, PhD candidate, UO Department of English (Folklore)

1973—More than thirty University Feminists loudly take over the steps of Johnson Hall to demand services for women on campus. The Oregon State Board of Higher Education signs off on the state’s first women’s studies program at University of Oregon. A librarian searches out the papers of early feminist Jane C. Grant for UO Library’s Special Collections. And a small core of faculty creates the Center for the Sociological Study of Women (CSSW) to support feminist research on campus.