B R I D G I N G

Uni ve r s i t y of M ar yl and

Fall 2008/Spring 2009

T he Department of

Women’s Studies

initiated the series

“This Too is Wom-

en’s Studies!” in Spring

2008, with the aim of engag-

ing students and community

members in feminist issues

and debates, beyond the

classroom.

Initiated by the Un-

dergraduate Committee, con-

sisting of Professors Elsa

Barkley Brown, Michelle

Rowley (Chair) and Ms.

Laura Nichols, the series has

a two-fold rationale. The first

is to broaden undergraduate students’

understanding of issues important to the

discipline; the second is to make con-

nections between the department and

the wider community by highlighting

the work of local activists, artists and

public intellectuals.

“The series engages students

in an ongoing discussion of the dynam-

ic nature of the discipline, especially

regarding social justice. As such, we

address issues and topics that might

appear to be familiar terrain, but we try

to add a different twist. Of course, we

are very committed to exploring topics

that are not readily associated with the

field of Women’s Studies” says Prof.

Rowley, who organized the inaugural

event of the series, the screening of the

film “Chocolate City” by local

filmmaker Ellie Walton, and British

filmmaker Sam Wild.

The film explores the gentrifi-

cation of the Arthur Capper/

Carrolsburg neighborhood in South-

This Too Is Women’s Studies! Series

Strives to Connect University, Artists and Activists

series include a screening

of work by and conversa-

tion with local filmmaker

Anabel Parker, who has

been working on the un-

folding immigration debate

in Prince William County.

Her work captures different

perspectives on this debate,

and is a real-time, interac-

tive project. It is possible to

view ongoing additions to

her body of work at

YouTube, as she adds to

the piece and workshops it

with communities for edu-

cational purposes.

The series will also

host hip-hop artist and play-

wright Rha Goddess, as part of

her performance of “LOW” at

the Clarice Smith Performing

Arts Center (see page 2 for

more details).

East Washington DC, and follows the

community’s displacement when they

are forced out of their homes to make

room for mixed-income residential

development. It pivots around the ex-

periences of Anu Yadav, a young

playwright, who volunteered with the

community for more than a year while

workshopping a play “Cappers,” about

the residents’ experiences of gentrifi-

cation and having to move out of the

only home many of them had ever

known. A Q&A session with the

filmmaker, the playwright, and a panel

of community activists followed the

screening.

“The activists who visited

with us did a great job of reminding

students that the campus should also

be seen as a location for activism and

engagement. They prompted students

to think about the issues affecting their

lives, and encouraged them to do

something about it,” says Rowley.

Forthcoming events in the

Playwrigth Anu Yadav performs her play “Cappers”

Upcoming Series Events October 13, 7 p.m.

Nyumburu Cultural Center:

“Who Got Next? Cultivating

“Feminine Centered Leader-

ship in a Global Hip Hop Era”

-- keynote discussion with

Rha Goddess.

October 15-17, 8p.m.

Clarice Smith Center:

Rha Goddess per forms Low.

October 29, 7 p.m.

Venue TBA:

Discussion with local

filmmaker, Anabel Park.

B R I D G I N G Page 2

Rha Goddess brings one-woman show to UM

T he Women’s Studies Department will host a post

-performance dialogue with multi-disciplinary

hip-hop artist, poet, and activist Rha Goddess,

who takes up an artist’s residency with the

Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center this fall.

Goddess’s one-woman show, LOW: Part 1 of the

Meditations Trilogy, chronicles a young woman’s battles

with the mythology and stigma surrounding mental illness.

Through the story of Lowquesha, the artist grapples with

the question “What is insanity?” providing a compassion-

ate, heartbreaking, and funny representation of this wom-

an’s journey through the mental health system.

Goddess is set to collaborate with a range of cam-

pus and community groups while in residence. As part of

her outreach work, she will conduct a post-performance

talk-back, hosted by the Department of Women’s Studies.

She will also join women's studies graduate students and

faculty for a discussion of creative performance as re-

search. Goddess’s work has been described as character-

ized by “linguistic brilliance, hip-hop rhythm and unflinch-

ing honesty.” LOW has played to capacity audiences at the

“Under the Radar” Theater Festival in New York, where it

was staged to launch the Hip Hop Mental Health Project,

which Goddess co-founded. The organization works to

“shift the cultural paradigm of shame and alienation sur-

rounding mental illness,” through integrating performance

and research-based dialogue.

“Her honesty is palpable, the imagery of her lan-

guage is rich, the hip-hop rhythm is… exactly right,” is

how a Cincinnati Enquirer review describes Goddess’s

performance in LOW, which is directed and staged by

Chay Yew. Goddess is internationally-renowned for her

writing, activism and hip hop. She is also the creator and

co-producer of the critically acclaimed young women’s

performance movement, “We Got Issues!”

LOW forms part of CSPAC’s “Art Responds to

War” Theme for the 2008/09 academic year, in collabora-

tion with the College of Arts and Humanities’ “War and

Representations of War” thematic semester.

Rha Goddess Performances and

Related Events

October 13, 7:00 p.m., Nyumburu Cultural Center

Rha Goddess, as part of the This, too is Women’s

Studies! Series: “Who Got Next? Cultivating Feminine

Centered Leadership in a Global Hip Hop Era” -- an

interactive keynote discussion.

October 15, 16, 17, 8:00 p.m.: Rha Goddess in Low at

CSPAC . The October 15 performance includes a 6:30

p.m. pre-performance discussion and a post- discussion

with local and national mental health professionals.

October 16 per formance: doors open ear ly for a pre

-performance questionnaire on your experiences and

attitudes regarding mental health and illness; following

the performance there is a post-performance question-

naire and discussion with Rha Goddess and Dr. Karen

Singleton. Thursday night’s performance is part of the

Hip Hop Mental Health Project.

October 17 per formance includes a post-performance

discussion with Rha Goddess and arts consultant Su-

zanne Callahan.

Undergraduate students and faculty have established the de-

partment’s Honor Society: Triota.

Iota Iota Iota is named for the ancient goddesses

Inanna, Ishtar, and Isis, and is an academic society specifical-

ly for the field of Women’s Studies, which aims to encourage

and support undergraduate scholarship and excellence. Triota

has chapters at over 100 colleges in the U.S. and Canada.

The UM chapter will be known as the Beta Beta

Chapter. Its executive comprises undergraduate students Es-

ther Faber (President), Renee Davidson (Vice President for

Outreach), and Erin Lester (Vice President for Finance).

Women’s Studies majors and faculty on the Under-

graduate Committee jointly drafted a constitution aimed at

conveying the spirit and character of Women’s Studies train-

ing at Maryland. The constitution highlights the importance

of maintaining feminist values as central to its work.

Prof. Michelle Rowley, Chair of the Undergraduate

Committee says the constitution seeks to centralize egalitari-

anism, inclusiveness, the celebration and study of diversity,

and the analysis of structures of power in society.

“It is my hope that the organization will work to

promote student research and activism in political issues that

structure varying forms of inequity and that it will work to

further centralize activism and social justice issues in the de-

velopment of Women’s Studies,” says Rowley. Contact

Michelle Rowley at mrowley1@umd.edu to donate to Triota.

New Honor Society for WMST

Page 3

Semester on War Inspires New WMST Course concerning women and war, or women warriors, will be

included in the course. She has structured it to begin with

what she calls the “complex issues, sometimes about enter-

tainment and its uses of women and war; sometimes about

creative approaches to the problems of war.” Students will

be asked to bring into the classroom film, comics, and other

cultural products, and create connections between these and

more traditional texts. Her orientation toward cultural anal-

ysis, media, technology and social critique means that ex-

aminations of cultural artifacts’ and the media’s underpin-

nings or subversions of war will form a large part of the

course. King anticipates that the current U.S. conflicts

against Iraq and Afghanistan, and the remilitarization of

these areas will loom large in discussions in her class.

Given the interdisciplinary nature of the course,

students who enroll can expect to make connections with

other classes within ARHU that are working on the same

theme. On her personal investments in the topic, King re-

flects that “life is interdisciplinary. I am myself an Army

Brat, a child of the US military, and lived on military bases

and in countries that the US had military interests in. I got

involved in the ant-war movement when I first went to col-

lege, but also found activists to be a bit ignorant about what

being in the military means in many forms. The US mili-

tary is a strange peace-time institution too; the most social-

ist of all US domains. Social change occurs in complicated

ways in the military – top down, and yet often ahead of

some kinds of change in the country broadly.”

In a world that has become increasing militarized, Women

and War is fast-growing area in the field of Feminist and

Women’s Studies. In line with a increasing body of research

and activism on this topic, the Department is for the first

time offering the course “Women and War, Feminism and

Militarism,” under the tutelage of Professor Katie King.

The course is an interdisciplinary offering, open to

both upper-level undergraduates and graduate students. It has

three broad sections “Are Women Warriors?” “Feminism

and Militarism,” and “Women, Security and Peace.”

King conceived of the course when asked to partici-

pate in the College of Arts and Humanities’ academic theme

for Fall 2008, “A Semester on War and the Representation of

War: “I immediately saw how exciting this could be and said

yes. I already had friends in English who were going to do a

thematic class. Jason Rudy and Martha Nell Smith are doing

a course on women’s anti-war poetry too,” says King.

The course draws conceptually on the work of,

amongst others, Cynthia Enloe and her partner, Joni Seager,

who both bring feminist analysis to militarism. “Enloe has

been one of the most influential feminists articulating clearly

how central women are to military issues, even when at first

glance they appear absent,” says King. “Seager is known for

showing how military bases, especially U.S. ones, change the

areas around them, socially and environmentally.”

Other key texts for the course will be materials from

Carol Cohn, Laura Sjoberg, and Inderpal Grewal. King will

also be using the dissertations of newly-minted Ph.D.’s from

this university: Kim Williams of Women’s Studies, and

Michelle Brown from the Department of English.

King’s own work on re-enactments, especially those

Laura A. Logie, with her ad-

visor, Ruth Enid Zambrana

Laura A. Logie’s disser tation,

“An Intersectional Gaze at

Latinidad, Nation, Gender and

Self-Perceived Health Status,”

examines the intersections of

Latinidades, health, gender, and nation, with a sample of

Central and South American immigrants. The study investi-

gates selected health care factors associated with self-

perceived health status. Drawing from both quantitative and

qualitative data, the study interrogates biomedical

knowledge production by theorizing the importance of the

intersection of race/ethnicity and class as central in main-

taining health disparities. Laura continues her intersectional

research as a Faculty Associate and Interim Assistant Direc-

tor of The Consortium on Race, Gender, and Ethnicity.

Kimberly Williams’ disser tation, entitled “Casualties of

Cold War: Toward a Feminist Analysis of American Na-

tionalism in U.S.-Russian Relations,” interrogates the gen-

dered, heteronormative, and racialized discursive configu-

rations that constituted the framework of U.S.-Russian

relations between the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991

and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Her project

draws attention to the links between cultural and national

identities, the politics of knowledge production, and the

circulation of power in transnational contexts by incorpo-

rating the approaches and perspectives of transnational

feminist cultural studies, theories of performance, and

feminist theories of international relations into an analysis

of American nationalism and U.S. foreign policy. Kimber-

ly has taken a position as Visiting Lecturer in Gender

Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, for 2008-

2009. She teaches courses on sex, gender, and the body,

transnational feminist and queer theories, gender and

world politics, and gender, sexuality, and popular culture.

Clare C. Jen successfully defended her Ph.D. Disser ta-

tion: “SARS Discourse Analysis: Technoscientific Race-

Nation-Gender Formations in Public Health Discourse.”

Three Women’s Studies students

graduate with Ph.D.s

B R I D G I N G Page 4

Teaching in Budapest: Reflections and Remembrances By Deborah Rosenfelt

In spring semester 2008, I was lucky enough to spend a se-

mester as a visiting professor teaching in the Gender Studies

Department at Central European University (CEU) in Buda-

pest, Hungary. CEU is a unique institution, founded in 1991

by George Soros and the Open Society project, and offering a

wide range of graduate programs to students from Central

and Eastern Europe, Central

Asia, and developing countries

around the world. The Gender

Studies Department offers a

terminal master’s degree, which

students earn in one very in-

tense academic year, and a

Ph.D.; starting this fall it will

also offer a two-year M.A. with

a more applied and policy-

oriented focus to accommodate

students interested in working

in the region’s many NGO’s

addressing women’s issues.

My connection to the

CEU department goes back

several years. In the mid-

1990's, the Curriculum Trans-

formation Project and the

Women’s Studies Department

received a series of Ford Foun-

dation grants designed to inter-

nationalize the women’s studies

curriculum and encourage the

incorporation of gender issues in international studies. Subse-

quently, we secured funds to support a series of summer insti-

tutes and conferences enabling us to work and think about

feminist theory, scholarship, and pedagogy together with

scholars from institutional sites around the world. Ultimately,

we created an informal international consortium of eight uni-

versities with graduate programs in women’s and gender stud-

ies, including CEU. Having worked closely with several CEU

faculty at our summer institutes and also on a visit to Buda-

pest on my way home from a Fulbright in Ukraine, I was in-

vited to teach at CEU and also to work on a region-wide fac-

ulty development project that would bring me in May to Tbili-

si in the Republic of Georgia for a fascinating three days of

productive daytime workshops and memorable nighttime

feasts.

At CEU I taught the second semester of a required

course called Foundations in Women’s Studies, similar to

UM’s two-semester required sequence, and an elective meth-

odology course, Reading Women Writers. My bright, hard-

working students came from Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Geor-

gia, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Romania, Serbia, Turkey,

Ukraine, and the U.S., as well as from Hungary. I marvelled at

their ability to complete their coursework and write substan-

tial master’s theses in a second (or third or fourth) language

within a nine-month time frame. I served on six M.A. thesis

committees and one doctoral dissertation committee, learning

about topics ranging from attitudes about and practices of

child-rearing in post-socialist Slovenia to the representation

and significance of women’s bicycling in early twentieth-

century Lithuania.

I was struck at CEU by how differently from wom-

en’s studies in the U.S. “difference” is constructed. Here,

thinking about “differences”

has most often required atten-

tion to social relations of race,

class, and sexuality, as well as

gender, and of course much

important feminist thought has

addressed the ways in which

these categories are mutually

constitutive, intersecting, and

socially consequential. At

CEU, where the students come

from many different nations,

and where the common de-

nominator of their experience

has been the transition of their

countries from socialism to –

well, to something else, most

typically a kind of democratic

capitalism--issues of national

identity, ethnicity, and politi-

cal affiliation become crucial.

The importance of “post-

socialism” in defining identi-

ties and establishing a com-

mon starting point for thinking about the relationship of the

state to the individual suggests to me that feminist theory in

the West has often suffered from a blind spot in reducing

global relations of power to first and third world. Central and

Eastern Europe is neither the “West” nor the “third

world” (these terms themselves are at best simplifications and

at worst misnomers), and its experiences and historical mem-

ories are quite different. For example, a student from Georgia

was passionate about the importance of psychoanalytic theory

for thinking about Georgian literature. In Soviet times, she

argued, attention to the unconscious was virtually verboten,

and restoring an exploration of the psyche to analysis of na-

tional culture could not only reveal new dimensions of the

writing of women and men, it could suggest how post-

socialist writing itself inscribes a deliberate gendered return of

the repressed.

This does not mean, however, that western feminist think-

ing about difference is irrelevant there; far from it. My CEU

students were greatly intrigued by the work of feminist schol-

ars of color working in “the West,” whose arguments about

difference and power–and their implications for the substance

and methodology of research–they found compelling. This

work seemed especially germane to the handful of students

researching the experience and culture of the Roma, whose

Debby Rosenfelt (2nd), with Susan Zimmerman (Central Euro-

pean University), Elisheva Baumgarten (Bar Illan University)

and daughter, and Francisca De Haan (Central European Uni-

versity); an informal reunion in Budapest of colleagues in the

International Consortium of Graduate Studies in Women and

Gender.

Page 5

status throughout CEE is shockingly marginal. Again, atten-

tion to the nature and priorities of the state become highly

relevant, as the situation of the Roma is by all accounts

worsening since the fall of state socialism, which guaranteed

education and work for all, in contrast to current forms of

capitalist democracy.

One vigorous class discussion about religion, eth-

nicity, and national identity circulated around my surprise

that in an ostensibly secular state like Hungary, the crown of

the Christian King St. Stephen is described in the wall dis-

play at the famous Matthias Church as “indispensable for

exercising the supreme power lawfully” and “the possessor

of the supreme power in this country.” Does that mean, I

asked, that those who are not Christian are by definition ex-

cluded from full participation in the life of the state? The

visible rise of a Christian nationalist right wing in Hungary

signals the growing presence of some who would answer

yes; my students, however, argued that this expression of a

specifically Catholic nationalist sentiment was perhaps a

reaction to its former prohibition under Communism.

Personally, I have never been as aware of my own identi-

ty as a Jew as I was in Hungary, perhaps not least because

none of my students were Jewish. The history of World War

II and the Holocaust loomed large for me, larger than I had

anticipated. I visited the magnificent synagogue where many

Jews took refuge and many died in the terrible winter of

1944. I spent an afternoon at the simple memorial–shoes cast

in iron and bronze–by the banks of the Danube where in that

same winter 20,000 Jews were herded into the Danube, shot,

and drowned. I began to read the memoirs of Hungarian Jew-

ish women. Visiting the town of Szentendre with Evi Beck,

our former Chair, we fell in love with the work of a Hungari-

an ceramist, Margit Kovacs, known in Hungary for her rep-

resentations of Hungarian peasant life–and learned only later

that she had been born and raised as a Jew, converting to

Catholicism in the 1940's along with other noted Hungari-

an intellectuals. Behind Kovacs’s extraordinary body of

work lies a life story that has never been told, though her

art, as her longtime friend Fifi Radnoti told me when I

asked about her personal life, “speaks for itself.”

I had long discussions with my CEU colleagues

about these issues of identity, history, consciousness, and

expression, and about their consequences for the shape of

women’s studies and feminist thought in the region. Susan

Zimmerman, Eva Fodor, and Allaine Cerwonka have all

written about gender studies and feminist theory in CEE,

and their work was immensely helpful. I was the benefi-

ciary of their hospitality as well as their intellect. Susan

invited me to her home in Vienna for a long weekend, and

escorted me and visiting colleague Judith Stacey to the

lovely provincial town of Kaposvar, where her partner

memorably conducted the orchestra for a spring festival.

Francisca De Haan, who shared with me her findings for

her project on the history of the international women’s

movement and its relation to the socialist left, wined and

dined me on wonderful vegetarian cooking. Jasmina

Lukics introduced me over coffee to the superb fiction and

essays of Dubravka Ugresic, whose work became a criti-

cal favorite in my Reading Women Writers class. Ugresic

lost her country twice, once when post-Socialist Yugosla-

via devolved into its current ethnically-defined nations,

and once when her refusal to endorse Croat nationalism

during the Serbian-Croatian conflict forced her into exile. I

encountered the work of other fine women writers from

the region, but much of it has yet to be translated into Eng-

lish. Jasmina and I dream of editing a volume, Women

Writing Post-Socialism. Perhaps we can make it come

true.

New PhD Students Bring a Range of Skills

Laura Brunner joins

the University of Mary-

land from the Centre for

Women's Studies and Gen-

der Research at Monash Uni-

versity in Melbourne, Austral-

ia. She holds a Bachelor's

Degree in English Literature

from NYU, with a minor in Economic Theory.

After her undergraduate degree, she worked for two

years in the recruitment and human resources field in New

York. Her primary areas of interest include gender, class,

work, and organization. Her Master's Qualifying thesis, enti-

tled Work Boundaries and Bodies: Sexual Harassment in the

New Economy, is an applied study of sexual harassment

across industries and workers representative of the Australi-

an economy.

Laura is also the author of "How Big is Big enough?: Big,

Steve and Phallic Masculinity in Sex and the City" to be pub-

lished in March, 2009, in Feminist Media Studies. The arti-

cle examines the ways in which the popular HBO comedy

engages with and revises typical representations of mascu-

linity in television. Laura has just returned home to Balti-

more after seven years to live with her family.

Julie R. Enszer is a poet, wr iter , and

activist. She completed her Master of

Fine Arts in Creative Writing - Poetry

at the University of Maryland in May

2008. Her poetry has been published

in Iris: A Journal About Women,

Room of One’s Own, Long Shot, the

Web Del Sol Review, and the Jewish

Women’s Literary Annual. Her poems

are forthcoming in Women's Review

of Books, MiPOesias, and Queer Poet-

ry 2007. She is a regular book reviewer for the Lambda

Book Report and Calyx. She is a regular contributor to The

Washington Blade and has a new syndicated column, (Continued on page 8)

B R I D G I N G Page 6

News from Faculty and Grad Students: Publications,

Awards, Presentations

UNDERGRADUATE NEWS

Gwen Emmons has been awarded the Philip Merr ill

Presidential Scholar Award, one of only twenty five given

annually. Her faculty mentor is Dr. Michelle Rowley.

Erin Ready has been named a Dean’s Senior

Scholar in the College of Arts and Humanities.

GRADUATE STUDENT NEWS

Ana Perez, Rajani Bhatia, Kimberlee Staking, Barbara

Boswell and Mel Lewis r eceived Master s of Ar ts De-

grees in Women's Studies in May 2008 and will continue

to pursue Ph.D.s in Women's Studies.

Mel Lewis presented her work on Black Queer Femi-

nist Pedagogy and Performance at the Women of Color

Scholarship of Activism & Activism of Scholarship Sym-

posium at Southern Connecticut State University with Dr.

Yi-Chun Tricia Lin and Dr. Layli Phillips in March 2008.

Bettina Judd’s poem: " Sankofa: Genderbend,”

was published in the Fall 2007 issue of Torch: An Online

Literary Journal for African American Women, available at

www.torchpoetry.org. She will also publish "It Must Have

Been This Way" in the forthcoming Anniversary Anthology

for Cave Canem, 2008.

Amy Washburn presented a paper , “Power ,

Where Art Thou?: Queering Liberalism & Radicalizing Post/

Modern Struggles for Revolution in the United States,” at

the fourth annual DC Queer Studies Symposium in April

2008.

Genevieve Page r eceived a Social Sciences and

Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellow-

ship, as well as a University of Maryland Summer Research

Grant. She published “Dérives d’une « troisième vague » :

une critique féministe radicale” Recherches Féministes 20,

2 (2007): 141-162. Her co-authers were Mélissa Blais, Lau-

rence Fortin-Pelletier, and Ève-Marie Lampron.

Kimberly Williams r eceived the Michael J .

Pelczar Award for Excellence in Graduate Study, University

of Maryland, 2008; and an International Studies Association

Travel Grant for 2008. She will publish the following:

• “Cold War Lessons: The International Spy Museum and the

U.S. Security State,” in The Politics of Cultural Program-

ming in Public Spaces, ed. Robert Gehl and Victoria Watts

(Cambridge Scholars Publishing, forthcoming).

• Review of Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make

the Link, by Cynthia Enloe (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007),

International Feminist Journal of Politics, vol. 10, no. 3

(forthcoming).

• Review of Russians in Hollywood, Hollywood’s Russians:

Biography of an Image, by Harlow Robinson (Northeastern

University Press, 2007), Journal of American Culture

(forthcoming).

Kimberly presented the following papers at conferences dur-

ing the past year:

• “’Who Lost Russia?’ Sex Trafficking and U.S. Russia Poli-

cy,” at the 49th International Studies Association Annual

Convention, San Francisco, March 2008.

• “Support for What, Freedom for Whom? Making Feminist

Sense of U.S. Assistance to Russia,” at the Northeast Politi-

cal Science Association Conference, Philadelphia, November

2007.

• “Cold War Lessons: The International Spy Museum and the

U.S. Security State,” at the First Annual Cultural Studies

Conference, George Mason University, September 2007.

With support from the department and the Goldhaber

Fund, Rajani Bhatia attended an international workshop, IVF

as Global Form: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Transna-

tionalization of Reproductive Technologies at Humboldt Uni-

versity in Berlin, during the summer of 2008. She was one

of about 25 researchers reflecting on the world-

(Continued on page 7)

Ana Perez and Mel Lewis celebrate receiving their

Masters’ Degrees

Undergraduate students Leyda Molina, Chaniesa Bur-

nett, Saule Kassengaliyeva, Karina Reid, Sarah Bet-

man, Mandy Adams, Miranda Vargas and Alexandra

Kirk receive their BA degrees.

Page 7

encompassing spread of so called assistive reproductive tech-

nologies, on the emerging transnationalisation of reproduc-

tion, and on the diversity of social, ethical, economical, and

political forms which accompany reproductive technologies

in different contexts. Rajani presented her most recent work

on U.S. practices of sex selection.

Anaya McMurray’s ar ticle “Hotep and Hip-Hop:

Can Black Muslim Women be Down With Hip-Hop?” has

been published in Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnation-

alism 8.1 (2008) 74-92.

Ana Perez received a Graduate School Summer

Fellowship, which she used to complete her major field ex-

amination “Towards an Understanding of U.S. Latino Racial

Formations.” The work explores the gendered and racialist

contours of Latino experiences in the U.S. Ana also pub-

lished “Recognition, Ambivalence, and ‘Making Sense’ of

Latino Youth in Wassup Rockers,” in LATINIDADES: A

Publication of the Latino Studies Working Group. 1: Spring

2008, 10-11 (University of Maryland).

Mel Lewis and Barbara Boswell were named

Distinguished Teaching Assistants for 2007-2008 by the

Center for Teaching Excellence.

Barbara Boswell r eceived a 1st Place Award of Excellence

for Research in the Area of Culture, Literature and Society

for her presentation “Black South African Women Writers:

Narrating the Nation, Narrating the Self,” at UMD’s Gradu-

ate Research Interaction Day, 2008.

Nikki Ayanna Stewart is par t of the founding

staff of Excel Academy, Washington, DC's first all-girls pub-

lic charter school.

Angel Miles r eceived enhancement funding from

the Consortium on Race, Gender and Ethnicity to help her

advance to candidacy this year. She presented a paper enti-

tled "Disabling Inequalities, Intersecting Identities: A Femi-

nist Disability Analysis of Race" at the UMCP Promise Re-

search Symposium in January 2008 and at the National

Black Graduate Student Association Conference in Chicago

Illinois in March 2008.

(Continued from page 6) FACULTY NEWS

Katie King has published " Networked Reenact-

ments: A Thick Description amid Authorships, Audiences

and Agencies in the Nineties." In Writing Technologies, a

new journal which can be read online at http://

www.ntu.ac.uk/writing_technologies/Currentjournal/

index.html

She has accepted an invitation to lead a week

long graduate seminar on feminist methodologies at the

Nordic Research School in Interdisciplinary Gender Stud-

ies in Stockholm, Sweden in November. She will be work-

ing with Ulrika Dahl, an anthropologist who does science

studies, and Malin Rönnblom, a political scientist who

does ethnographic work on public policy and the EU.

King has also been appointed to the Editorial Ad-

visory Board of an exciting new venture, the Open Hu-

manities Press. Open Humanities Press is an international

Open Access publishing collective specializing in critical

and cultural theory. OHP was formed by academics to

“overcome the current crisis in scholarly publishing that

threatens intellectual freedom and academic rigor world-

wide.” All OHP publications are peer-reviewed, published

under open access licenses, and freely and immediately

available online at www.openhumanitiespress.org .

Seung-kyung Kim r eceived a Senior Advanced

Research Grant from the Korea Foundation, 2007-8, which

she will use to complete two books: Women’s Movements

in Democratic South Korea: The Trajectory of Institution-

alization and the Loss of Autonomy, and Global Citizens in

the Making?: Transnational Migration and Education in

Kirogi Families.

She presented a paper, “Global Citizens in the

Making?: Transnational Migration and Education in Kirogi

Families,” at the Korean Migration and Development Con-

ference in 2007, and was the Session Organizer and Chair

of the panel “Impossibilities of Gender Mainstreaming:

Evaluating Women’s Movements in Bangladesh, South

Korea, Taiwan, and the Anglophone Caribbean,” at

the Interdisciplinary International Congress of Women’s

Studies in Madrid, Spain during July 2008. In addition,

she presented a paper, “Women’s Movements in Demo-

cratic South Korea: The Trajectory of Institutionalization

and the Loss of Autonomy,” at the same conference.

Michelle Rowley has been recognized by the

Dean of Undergraduate Studies at UM as a Phillip Merrill

Presidential Scholar (for undergraduate student, Gwen

Emmons) as the faculty mentor with the most impact on

the student's academic achievement.

Bonnie Thornton Dill and Ruth Enid Zambra-

na have co-edited the collection Emerging Intersections:

Race, Class and Gender in Theory, Policy and Practice,

which will be published by Rutgers University Press in

2009. Both Thornton Dill and Zambrana have several indi-

vidual and co-authored articles.

Bonnie Thornton Dill will chair a Sociology

delegation for the People to People Citizen’s Ambassadors

Program, which travels to South Africa in the Fall of 2008.

Bonnie Thornton Dill, Lynn Bolles, Barbara Boswell,

Mel Lewis and Jeffrey McCune at the CTE’s Award Cer-

emony

CIVILesbianIZATION. Her scholarly interests are in the

creation of lesbian identity through poetry and the transmis-

sion of lesbian poetry and identity through communities of

readers. She has worked in the LGBT movement and was

the program director of Affirmations Lesbian/Gay Commu-

nity Center in Detroit. She is the first WMST grad student to

be awarded a prestigious Flagship Fellowship by the Gradu-

ate School.

Lara Torsky moved to the DC

area from New York City, where

she spent the past two years com-

pleting a Master's degree at NYU

in Humanities and Social

Thought. While at NYU her re-

search interests included the areas

of gender, sexuality, and popular

culture. Her Master's thesis,

which she hopes to expand upon

for her dissertation, examines

identity, convergence culture, and

the television show “The L Word.”

Having attended UM as a Women’s Studies and

Psychology undergraduate major, she is looking forward to

returning to the area and exploring DC.

(Continued from page 5)

Department of Women’s Studies University Of Maryland

2101 Wods Hall

College Park, MD 20742

Phone: 301-405-6877

Fax: 301-314-9190

E-mail: womensstudies@umd.edu

Visit us on the web at

www.womensstudies.umd.edu

New PhD students (cont.)

BRIDGING is a publication of the Depar tment of Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland and was designed and wr itten by Barbara Boswell.

(Continued on page #)

(Continued from page 7)

The delegation aims to increase knowledge and under-

standing of current social science scholarship, social activ-

ism, and the relationship between them, in addressing the

intersections of race, ethnicity, class, and gender in South

Africa.

Elsa Barkley Brown has been awarded the

College of Arts and Humanities Faculty Service Award.

She will receive the award at the College Convocation on

September 9, 2008, at 3:30 pm; Clarice Smith Performing

Arts Center, Gildenhorn Recital Hall

Lynn Bolles was elected President of the

Society of Anthropology of North America (SANA), a unit

of the American Anthropological Association. SANA is

one of the leading progressive units of the AAA, often

partnering with the Association for Feminist Anthropolo-

gy; Association of Black Anthropologists, Association of

Latina and Latino Anthropologists and the Society of Les-

bian and Gay Anthropologists. Recently, her chap-

ter, "The Caribbean is for Sale" appears in Gendering

Globalization (2008: School of American Research) edited

by Nandini Gunewardena and Ann Kingslover. The book

project was initiated during Bolles’s presidency of the As-

sociation for Feminist Anthropology.

Jeffrey McCune has published " 'Out' in the

Club: The Down Low, Hip-Hop, and the Architexture of

To Donate to Women’s Studies: Contact Annie Carter

Coordinator of Business Services

Department of Women’s Studies at

adel@umd.edu