"Thinking About Nineteenth -Century Women's Literary Collaboration:
Feminist and Queer Considerations"
by Jill Ehnenn
Friday, April 25, 2008, 4:00pm, Belk Library, Room 114
Reception for 2008 Women's Studies Graduates
immediately following Seminar
Jill Ehnenn joined Appalachian State University's English faculty in 2001 and is a member of the Graduate Faculty and Women's Studies Faculty. Her current projects include continued archival work on the two late-Victorian women who wrote collaboratively under the pseudonym "Michael Field." Work-in-progress on contemporary queer issues include an article on Harry Potter, and one on homosexuality and choice.
In her newly published book, Women's Literary Collaboration, Queerness and Late-Victorian Culture, she explores the collaborations of Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) and "Kit" Anstruther-Thomson; Somerville and Ross (Edith Somerville and Violet Martin); Elizabeth Robins and Florence Bell; and Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper (the pseudonymous "Michael Field"), offering a timely interrogation into the different histories and functions of women's literary partnerships.
______________________________________________________________________ PAST SEMINARS
_______________________________________________________________________
"Mapping the Road Toward Women's Economic Self-Sufficiency: The Role of Microcredit"
Jeanne d'Arc Gomis
September 7
Calloway Peak Room Plemmons Student Union 3pm
Jeanne d'Arc Gomis is a Study Abroad Advisor and French Instructor at Appalachian State University. She is a native of Senegal and holds a graduate degree in Educational Policy and Administration with an emphasis in Non-Formal Education and Socio-Economic Development from the University of Minnesota. Ms. Gomis also holds a combined Bachelors and Masters degree with Distinction in Languages Applied to Tourism and Business from the Institute of Applied Foreign Languages and an Associate degree in Literature from Cheikh Anta Diop University, both in Dakar, Senegal.
Her topic was the subject of her Master's Thesis. Grameen Bank (GB) AND Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC), two micro-credit institutions that have attracted attention around the world and have surprised many conventional bankers with the success of their anti-conventional approach, which consists of the provision of small loans to the poor, particularly women, for income-generating activities. The GB and BRAC approaches are an exemplary contribution to the alleviation of poverty, human enhancement, and economic self-sufficiency of the women who participate in the programs. The study of their approach is a reference for future designers of micro-credit in the economically developing world.
"The Caveman Mystique: How Popular Scientific Claims Shape Men's Consciousness"
Martha McMaughey
Director of Women's Studies
September 28
I. G. Greer Room 224 (Faculty Senate Room) 5p.m.
Martha McCaughey is Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and Director of Women's Studies at Appalachian State University. A sociologist by training, her interdisciplinary work examines the body, science, technology, gender, and violence.
Has evolution made men promiscuous skirt-chasers? In her forthcoming book The Caveman Mystique: Pop-Darwinism and the Debates Over Sex, Violence, and Science, Martha McCaughey offers a fresh understanding of science, science popularization, and the impact of science on men's identities.
"Acceptable Femininity: Exploring Gender Through Art"
Jessica Burke
October 19
Calloway Peak Room Plemmons Student Union 4pm
Jessica Burke is an adjunct professor in the Art Department at Appalachian State University and art instructor at both the Sawtooth School for Visual Art in Winston-Salem and the Center for the Visual Arts in Greensboro. Ms. Burke holds a Master of Fine Arts in Drawing/ Painting from the University of Greensboro, a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting/Drawing and Bachelor of Arts in Art History from Oklahoma State University. She also studied at the Academy of Art College in San Francisco, the Utrecht School for the Arts in Utrecht, the Netherlands and the Tuscan School of Landscape Painting in Siena, Italy. She is a native of Wichita, Kansas.
Ms. Burke's seminar will deal with her work as an artist and the development of themes that are prevalent in her drawings and paintings. This body of work is a meditation on identity and persona. It allows her to express her reaction to issues about gender, sexuality, and specifically the idea of femininity. She will explore the idea of popular culture as a teaching device bombarding us with embedded associations that define "accepted" parameters of femininity. Ms. Burke will also discuss other contemporary artists who deal with similar issues. "Wangari Maathai: First African Woman Nobel Laureate."
Friday, November 30 4:00 Belk Library Room 114
By Dr. Jeremiah Kitunda and Lynne Mansure
2004 Noble Peace Prize recipient Dr. Wangari Muta Maathai, of Kenya, is the first African woman to receive a Noble Peace Prize. She is an environmental and political activist and the founder of the Green Belt Movement which has planted over thirty million trees across Kenya.
Lynn Mansure has co-authored a book on Kenya published by Grolier Press, and has spent 40 years of her life in Kenya. She is currently a visiting professor of French at Appalachian State University.
Dr. Jeremiah Kitunda is an Assistant Professor of History at Appalachian State University. Dr. Kitunda received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. His specialty is African History. "The Healing Power of Women in Postwar Bosnia and Serbia"
Friday, January 25 4:00 Calloway Peak Plemmons Student Union
By Amy Hudnall
Layers of memory shroud the land and the people of Bosnia and Serbia. They help to shape the hope and joy as well as the pain and the hate that one sees in the region’s people today in the aftermath of the 1992 genocide. The Bosniaks and the Serbs have chosen different paths in rebuilding, and women play seminal parts in the process. Recovering from genocide, life in concentration camps, and the loss of family members, Bosnia may be a phoenix rising from the ashes. Is there a common discourse that the Bosniak and Serbian women share amidst the ongoing bitterness and nationalism, or do the women play an equally important role in kindling a fire of hatred instead of rejuvenation? How do they deal with the loss of family, the implications of a war in which rape was used as a military weapon? These and other aspects of women’s lives in postwar Bosnia will be discussed.
Amy Hudnall is a Lecturer in the History Department and a member of the Women's Studies Department at Appalachian State University Her work focuses on genocide and trauma, women's trauma, and peace and conflict. She has presented and published on captivity and terrorism, human rights, secondary trauma, cultural relativism, and cross-cultural conflict. She recently presented at UNESCO Paris on the role of mothering and cultural trauma. She sits on multiple advisory boards of human rights organizations. She was the managing editor of the NWSA Journal and is currently the editor of the electronic Journal of Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies and the managing editor of the Journal of Rural Mental Health. She is pursuing her PhD at Fielding Graduate University in Human Development, received her M.A. in history at Appalachian State University and also studied at the Bayerische Julius-Maximilian-Universität in Germany.
"Making it in the Men's Club:
Medieval Women at the Movies"
Friday, February 22, 4:00pm, Belk Library Room 114
followed at 6:30 by a potluck dinner at the home of Elizabeth Carroll
By Alexandra Sterling-Hellenbrand
"Well-behaved women rarely make history." Reclaiming history means re-investigating and re-inventing stories,
particularly to re-visit characters in them that may not have been allowed to speak in previous tellings. One of the most enduring
and constantly changing medieval tales is the story of King Arthur, which seems to reinvent itself in seemingly endless variation
across cultures and media through time. Figuring prominently in modern variations are several Arthurian women who have the
reputation for "behaving badly" and threatening to bring down kingdoms: Guinevere, Isolde, Morgan le Fay. As modern
film-makers in particular have told the story anew and have sought a new audience, they reflect that audience's vision of itself
and its hopes for the future. Thus, in the case of our misbehaving women, it is instructive to consider how contemporary film adaptations project women's agency and emancipation (or lack thereof) "backwards" into the cinematic interpretations of the medieval story.
Alexandra Sterling-Hellenbrand is Associate Professor of German and Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages
and Literatures at Appalachian. Her current research interests focus on gender and performance in (and of) medieval
German and Arthurian literature. She is currently working on a book manuscript that studies the interplay of medieval works
and modern audiences to the creation of shared cultural memory; the book is tentatively titled Mixed Media and Memory:
Crafting the performance of medieval German literature from the Nibelungenlied to Wolframs Eschenbach.
___________________________________________________________________
March 27, 2008 6:30pm Table Rock Room Plemmons Student Union
Georgia Rhoades and Kirsten Tiedemann
"The Sheela-na-gig"
Black Sheep Theatre presents "The Sheela-na-Gig,"
which includes a presentation about sheela-na-gigs, the medieval bald naked sculptures of old women found in Ireland, England, Scotland, and Wales on churches, towers, walls, and museums, as well as performance of an original theatre piece about sheelas. The presentation includes slides of photographs and drawings that Georgia Rhoades and Dennis Bohr have collected since 1995. The short play links sheelas, cultural forgetfulness, and Alzheimer's; it was written by Rhoades and will be performed by her and Kirsten Tiedemann with music and technical support by Dennis Bohr. Black Sheep recently presented this program in Cashel, Ireland, in November 2007, and has presented it in Dublin at WERRC, Galway at NUI, and at The Playhouse in Derry, Northern Ireland. After the performance we will welcome questions.
Georgia Rhoades teaches in the English Department at Appalachian. She has written and performed feminist theatre since 1995 and is a founding member of Black Sheep Theatre. She has presented her work, including her full-length play "Witchwork," at several venues in Ireland, England, and the U. S. Her current playwriting project is about trees.
Kirsten Tiedemann is a massage therapist and artist in Boone, North Carolina, who has performed with Black Sheep since 2005. Her mosaic work is currently exhibited at HANDS Craft Gallery. Her massage therapy practice is on East King Street.
______________________________________________________________________________ |