1 For Your Information
39993
For Your Information
Volume 7 Issue 2 November 2001
Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women's Studies
University of Rochester
Editor: Marilyn Lambert-Fisher, Program Manager, 538 Lattimore Hall,
4 For Your Information
Visiting Scholar
Phillip Brian Harper, Professor of English and of American Studies, New York University, is the 2001 Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies Visiting Scholar and the Craig Owens Memorial Lecturer.
November 29 Seminar for students, faculty and
12:30-1:45 PM interested others by Phillip Harper, GambleRoom "When Identities Collide: Reflections
361Rush Rhees on Race, Gender, Sexuality, and
Library Nationality in Contemporary U.S. Culture"
Advance readings available through the Voyager course reserves under WST 100, Phillip Brian Harper
All are welcome
November 30 "Social Identity, Abstractionist
6:00 PM Aesthetics, and Prospects for Cultural Gowen Room Critique"
Wilson Followed by a reception
Commons All are welcome
Up-to-date information: www.rochester.edu/college/wst/NOVEMBER/nov01.htm
December 5 Graduate student meeting to form
5:30 PM reading, discussion, and dissertation
540 Lattimore groups for MA/PhD, PhD/Pre-ABD, PhD/ABD students
Questions? Email
December 5 Graduate Student Speakers Series
6:30-7:30 PM Joanna Grant, Department of English
540 Lattimore "Intersections of Physical Culture and Primitivism, Modernism and Regionalism in Willa Cather's Nebraska"
Respondent: Professor Frank Shuffelton
See Also of Interest on pages 7-8 for other event
listings.
Women's Studies, State University College at Brockport began officially accepting majors in fall 2002. Susan B. Anthony Institute women's studies alumna Kathy Simpson ’93 is a board member. Congratulations to the women's studies Program.
With the bombing of Afghanistan we are looking for ways to provide Associates with more information and teaching materials on gender and Arab and/or Muslim culture. Though militarism lends itself to analyses of masculinity, we started with women.
Alex Tsybeskov, our student employee at the institute, has typed up a bibliography of books we own in Rush Rhees library on the subject of Arab and/or Muslim women. This list will be posted in the next FYI. The Institute is expecting copies of a number of videos on the topic of Muslim and/or Arab women. We will be posting to the students and Associates' email lists to notify you about the availability of these films for screening. Thanks to Women Make Movies for making many of these films available to us at no charge, and special thanks to Associate Tim Madigan of the UR Press. Tim provided the following description of two films of great interest that were received with enthusiasm at this year's Toronto Film Festival. Aubrey Anable of VCS is close to obtaining loans of these films for us, so keep a lookout for an email about screenings.
Lisa Cartwright
The Sun Behind the Moon, directed by Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Iran/France, 2001.
Nafas is a young journalist who was born in Afghanistan and raised in Canada. As the film begins, she is telling her story to a helicopter pilot as he tries to smuggle her in to Afghanistan. When her family had fled Afghanistan, Nafas's younger sister was maimed by a landmine and lost
in the fray. Nafas has received a letter from her sister; unable to go on living under the Taliban, she plans to commit suicide during the last eclipse of the millennium. Nafas has three days to find a way into the country, then to the city of Kandahar, in order to stop her. The film portrays the plight of Afghan refugees longing to return home, as well as victims of land mines trying to rebuild their lives. Makhmalbaf underscores the importance of his subject with juxtaposition of shocking imagery: the scene which forges a dire contrast between people without
legs and artificial legs without torsos is one not likely to be forgotten. Even the naming of the protagonist is evocative: when she is forced to cover herself in the heavy burka, or veil, to enter Afghanistan, she feels first-hand the suffocating lack of freedom experienced by
contemporary Afghan women. Still, Makhmalbaf has named her "Nafas", revealing his private, hopeful vision for the country's future: her name means respiration, to breathe."
The Daughter of Keltoum, directed by Mehdi Charef, France/Belgium 2001.
Ralla, abandoned by her mother when she was a baby and brought up in Switzerland by foster parents, has returned to her village in Maghreb to find her mothre, Keltoum. She is told by her grandfather that her mother works far away in a hotel in the city. If Ralla wants to wait for her, Keltoum comes home on Fridays. Slowly Ralla immerses herself in village life, shedding her Western garb and adopting the dress of her relatives. She helps her half-mad aunt with her chores, and eventually the surrounding culture seeps into her life. On Friday, the bus makes its lonely journey past the village but no one gets off. As time passes with no sign of her mother, Ralla and her aunt venture to the city to find her. The trip they make provides an engrossing view of contemporary North African life and its mores. It is not long before Ralla is shocked at some of the local customs which reduce women to little more than chattel. Brought up as a European, she straddles her two cultural heritages in an awkward manner. Simply getting by - eating and sleeping - is not an easy matter in this strict patriarchal society."
The Susan B. Anthony Institute is pleased to offer grants to faculty associates, graduate students, and undergraduates to support their research in gender and women’s studies. Proposals may include such items as travel to professional conferences (in cases where the applicant is on the program), travel for research purposes, and expenses connected with research and course development. Check the Institute's website
for "Frequently Asked Questions" about research grants (www.rochester.edu/college/wst/GRANT/grant.htm).
Announcements are sent to those on the Institute’s mailing list before each deadline. Deadlines for 2002 are February 6, and April 24.
Awarded October 2001
Associates
Rachel Ablow, Department of English
Archival research at New York Public Library for "The Marriage of Two Minds: Sympathy and the Mid-Victorian Marriage Plot."
Mary Fox, Psychiatry M&D Psychology
Presentation of "Seeing Faces Less Visible: Contributions of a Feminist Phenomenology" at the American Psychological Association.
Rosemary Kegl, Department of English
Presenting "When Cats Go to Heaven: Closet Drama and Renaissance Women's Writing" at the Modern Language Association Conference.
Anne Merideth, Department of Religion & Classics
Presenting "She Walks in Poorer Garb": Fashioning Christian Identity in Tertullian's On the Apparel of Women at the American Academy of Religion.
Andrés J. Nader, Department of Modern Languages and Cultures
Presenting "Violence and Difference in Male Homosexuality: Néstor Perlongher in Brazil" at
the Fremdes Begehren: Repräsentationsformen transkultureller Beziehungen Conference.
Ellen M. Santora, Warner School of Graduate Education
Facilitated collaboration on the Three Universities Internet Project in Newfoundland.
Graduate Students
Jomarie Alano, Department of History
Research for "A Life of Resistance: Ada Prospero Marchesini Gobette (1902-1968), Italina Writer, Translator, Partisan and Women's Right's Activist."
Tatyana V. Bakhmetyeva, Department of History
Research for "Stranger Among Her Own, Her Own Among Strangers: Sophie Swetchine (1782-1857), Russian Patriot With a French Heart (Identity and Authority in Nineteenth-Century Russia and France)."
Bobbi Carothers, Department of Clinical and Social Sciences in Psychology
Research for "Men and Women are from Earth: Examining the Dimensional and Categorical Indicators of Gender with Taxometric Procedures."
Joanna E. Grant, Department of English
Presented "'You Give Me Fever': Contagious Degeneration and Miasmatic Modernism in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness" at Modernist Studies Association Conference.
Mary Henold, Department of History
Research for "Strong in Our Knowing: The American Catholic Feminist Movement in the Postconciliar Era, 1965-1980."
Daniel Humphrey, Program in Visual and Cultural Studies
Research for "The Soil of History and the Seeds of Production: Ingmar Bergman's Time Square Debut."
Norman Vorano, Program in Visual and Cultural Studies
Research for "Invisible Seams: Early Exhibitions of Inuit Art at the Handicrafts Guild (1949-55)."
Elizabeth Wells, Musicology, Eastman School of Music
Presented "Me and Velma Ain't Dumb: The Women of West Side Story" at the Feminist Theory and Music 6 Conference.
We welcome information from Majors & Minors, Graduate Students, Faculty, and Alumni for the following sections. Please send information to the Institute.
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News from Gender and Women's Studies Students
Elizabeth Possee is studying abroad in Milan, Italy.
Sarah Vaughn is organizing Up 'Til Dawn on campus. This fundraising program operates through student teams that raise money for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Sarah reports that $1500 was raised in the first month with the help of various campus groups.
See Also of Interest on page 7 for more information about Up 'Til Dawn to see how you can be involved.
Spring 2002 Courses of Interest
WST 100 Gender and Popular Music, L. Soccio
(Course is full, please e-mail or stop in the office if you would like to be placed on the waiting list)
WST 206F Feminism, Gender, and Health, M. Fox (Course is full, please e-mail or stop in the office if you would like to be placed on the waiting list)
WST 286F Psychology of African American Women: Relationships, Sexuality, and Health, L. Hazel-Fernandez
WST 340 Writing Women’s Lives, J. Berlo, Susan B. Anthony Professor
Beginning in Spring 2002, all foundation courses will be WST ###F. Foundation course numbers will no longer be limited to WST 200-210.
NEW Fall 2002 Courses of Interest
WST 100 Introduction to Women’s Studies: Whodunit? and Why?, J. Grant
Description: As any reader of mystery novels knows, the figure of the detective is at once strange yet familiar, reassuring and threatening. This course examines what happens to the genre of the mystery novel when the more familiar figure of the private dick is replaced by a woman detective.
*More information about these and other interesting courses can be found at the Institute's web site, http://www.rochester.edu/college/wst or call the Institute at 275-8318.
Opportunity To Teach a Summer 2002 Course
If you are interested in teaching a summer course through Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender & Women's Studies, please e-mail Amy Johnson () and she will send you more detailed information. You may also pick up additional information from the bulletin board outside 538 Lattimore. The deadline by which you must get the completed application to the Institute is November 30.
Graduate Certificate in Gender & Women’s Studies
The Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women’s
Studies offers a formal Graduate Certificate in Gender and Women’s Studies for students who are enrolled in a graduate degree (Master’s or Ph.D.) program at the University of Rochester and for non-matriculated students who complete four or more courses from at least two University of Rochester graduate programs.
See requirements at www.cc.rochester.edu:80/college/wst/grad.htm
Application deadlines are December 5, 2001 and March 13, 2002.
News About Graduate Students
Jacalyn Eddy, 2001-2002 SBAI Dissertation Fellow; Department of History, has an article, "We Have Become Too Tender-Hearted": The Language of Gender in the Public Library, 1880-1920 which will be published in the fall issue of American Studies Journal.
Angela Gibson, Department of English, has an article, "Malory's Reformulation of Shame," forthcoming in the winter issue of Arthuriana.
Narin Hassan, Department of English, is a Visiting Assistant Professor at James Madison University. She is teaching Women's Literature, The Nineteenth-Century English Novel and a British literature survey. Next semester she will be teaching Feminist Theory, an advanced special topics course: Traveling Spirits: Gender, Nationalism and Imperial Culture, and a British literature survey. While at the University of Rochester, Narin received a Graduate Certificate in Gender and Women's Studies, taught WST 100 as a Susan B. Anthony Institute Teaching Fellow, was the 2000-2001 Susan B. Anthony Institute Dissertation Fellow, participated in the Gender and Women's Studies Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference for five years as a planning committee member, moderator and presenter, and in the dissertation group.
Mailing List
Graduate students who are on the Institute’s mailing list
receive information about opportunities and events. If you would like to be added to the list, send your coordinates to .
Samantha Bobb ’99 reports that she is doing editorial work for the New York Post. She spent a month vacationing in Guyama, South America.
Joe Lanning ’00 presented "Health and Society in Africa: Sustainable Development and the Peace Corps Experience," a slide show and talk, at an event sponsored by the Susan B. Anthony Institute, the Department of Anthropology and the Frederick Douglas Institute in October. Before returning to his job as a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi, Joe gave over thirty talks in area schools.
Nicole Nash ’92 is the Assistant Principal of the Hannah Senesh Community Day School in Brooklyn, NY. During
Summer 2000 she attended the Harvard Principals' Institute.
The following message is from Amanda Silver ’98:
On October 1, I returned from an 11month adventure abroad working and traveling in Bolivia, Peru, and Brazil. During the first eight and a half months, I spent my time working for a Bolivian NGO called Pro Mujer, teaching business skills to low or no-income women who wanted to start businesses. The work was difficult and challenging, but infinitely rewarding.
After leaving Bolivia, I spent two and a half months traveling. In Peru, I spent most of my time hiking on ancient Inca Trails, through deserts, mountain ranges, and ruins; while in Brazil I spent my month enrolled in Portuguese and African Drumming and Dance classes. Needless to say, I loved every minute of my travels, and am already scheming to return to Brazil within the next 2 years for an extended period of time.
I am now happily settled In Washington DC for the time being, temping at the Pan American Health Organization while I evaluate my long-term goals in relation to graduate school and my professional interests.
I am more than willing to talk to current students if any are interested in working for women's rights organizations, or traveling, working, and volunteering in South America, particularly in Bolivia or Peru. I have a lot of information that I gathered while I was abroad, and am also very familiar with the organizations and networks here in DC.