Women's and Gender Studies Faculty

Chantal Kalisa
Director of Women's and Gender Studies Program, Associate Professor Modern Languages and Literature and Women's Studies

Professor Chantal Kalisa recieved her Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. She teaches courses on Francophone African and Caribbean literatures and cultures with particular emphasis on postcolonial and gender studies. Her research focuses on representation of gendered violence in those literatures, particularly by women, the topic of a book manuscript, currently under publication contract with NU Press. She has published articles on Gisèle Pineau, Ken Bugul, Michèle Lacrosil, Sembène Ousmane, Aminata Sow Fall and Frantz Fanon. She contributed to and co-edited (with Prof. Rangira Béatrice Gallimore, U. of Missouri-Columbia), Dix ans après: Réflexions sur le gènocide rwandais (L'Harmattan, 2005), a volume of essays on the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Barbara DiBernard
Emerita Professor of Women's and Gender Studies and English

DiBernard is Professor of Women's Studies and English. She is also Graduate Chair of English. Her specialization and interests include 20th century women's literature, lesbian literature, disability literature and theory, and feminist pedagogy. She recently published “Teaching What I'm Not: An Able-Bodied Woman Teaches Literature by Women with Disabilities,” in “Teaching What You're Not,” ed. Katherine Mayberry, NYU Press, 1996., “Crossing the Road, or, What's a Nice Lesbian Feminist Like You Doing in a Place Like This?” in “Reflections: Narratives in the Helping Professions,” ed. Diane Gillespie and Susan Nummedal. Spring 1998. DiBernard was a Winner of OTICA (Outstanding Teaching and Instructional Activity) Award for University of Nebraska, 2000. She teaches Intro to Women Writers, 20th Century Women Writers, 20th Century Lesbian Writers, Gay and Lesbian Literature, and Women's Creative Nonfiction.

Rose Holz
Associate Director of Women's and Gender Studies, Professor of Practice in Women's and Gender Studies, and Lecturer in History

Rose likes to draw, paint, garden, cook and think about the past. She also likes to teach (such things as the history of women and gender, the history of sexuality, the history of medicine, and US history more generally) as well as to write. Her first story (“Nurse Gordon on Trial: Those Early Days of the Birth Control Clinic Movement Reconsidered”) was published in the Journal of Social History in the fall of 2005. Her first book, The Birth Control Clinic in a Marketplace World, will be published by the University of Rochester Press, as part of their History of Medicine Series, and is due out in Spring 2012. She has received a number of awards for the work she has done, none of which would have been possible without the training she has received from Nature's Table, the Bakeshop, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as well as the imaginary Institute for Plain Art. She would also like to express her deepest thanks to the artist who colored the portrait to the left whose name unfortunately is unknown.

Basuli Deb
Assistant Professor, English and Women's and Gender Studies

Professor Deb has a PhD from Michigan State University and did her disseration on “Women and Militancy: Narratives from Guatemala, India, and South Africa.” In her book manuscript, “Women In Conflict Zones: Human Rights Narratives and Postcolonial Perspectives,” Deb builds on these issues by studying postcolonial narratives depicting human rights violations against women in conflict zones. She has taught courses such as Imperial Women Writers and Those Who Rewrote the Empire, and (Neo)Imperial Legacies, Postcolonial Violence, and the Human Rights Struggle. As a specialist in Transnational Feminism, she will teach introductory women’s and gender studies courses as well as courses on transnational feminism.

Emily Kazyak
Assistant Professor, Women's and Gender Studies and Sociology

Professor Kazyak's research focuses on the question of how social and legal contexts shape the identities and family relationships of sexual minorities.

One of her current research projects analyzes the sexual identities of rural gays and lesbians. Motivated by research that points to the increasing geographical diversity of gays and lesbians - in contrast to cultural narratives that link gay and lesbian sexualities to urban spaces - this project seeks to understand how rural contexts shape the way that people construct gay and lesbian identities. Other analyses of the project examine how gender and class matter for the way people make sense of geography and for the experiences of sexual minorities in rural areas.

Donna Akers
Associate Professor in History and Ethnic Studies

In the thirteen years of my academic career, I have been the director of the Native American Studies Program at Cal State, Northridge, Assistant Professor of History at Purdue University, and Associate Professor at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Prior to my academic career, I was a successful marketing executive in the private sector for roughly 15 years.
My primary research area is 19th century Native American history and culture, global indigenous peoples, and US colonialism. I employ critical race theory using an indigenous paradigm informed by decolonization methodology.
My publications include two books, Living in the Land of Death: The Choctaw Nation, 1830-1860 and Choctaw Culture and History. I have also published several articles and book chapter and numerous book reviews.
I have been involved in continual service to my tribe, the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, the Native peoples of Indiana and Nebraska, and to regional and national Native organizations. I have also been active in global Indigenous organizations and have presented at dozens of national and international conferences.

Waskar Ari
Assistant Professor of History and Ethnic Studies

Waskar T. Ari received his Ph.D. from Georgetown University and is Assistant Professor of History and Ethnic Studies at University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He received his BA in Sociology from the Universidad de San Andres in La Paz, Bolivia, and also studied an MA in Political Science. He has published several articles and books in Bolivia, including Historia de una Esperanza (1994), a book on economic change and the making of new traditions. He co-authored Tata Fermin (1996), a book on the Indian leader Fermin Vallejos and indigenous movements in the southern part of Cochabamba.

Radha Balasubramanian
Associate Professor, Modern Languages and Literatures/ Russian

Dr. Balasubramanian received her Ph.D. in Russian Literature from Indiana University. Her area of specialization is nineteenth-century Russian literature with an emphasis on short fiction. She has published a book on Korolenko's short fiction, and articles on works by Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Korolenko, Sholokhov, Sologub, Bulgakov, and Rushdie on teaching Russian to foreigners. Her present research project is devoted to the
influences of India on Russian literature and vice-versa. She writes articles and short stories to newspapers and magazines on cultural and social problems of Indians.

Grace Bauer
Professor of English/Creative writing; poetry

Professor Bauer's areas of specialty include poetry writing, contemporary poetry, women writers, short fiction and creative nonfiction. She regularly teaches courses on Writing of Poetry, Poetic Form, Poetry Since 1960, and 20th Century Women Writers. Among Bauer's honors and awards is the Academy of American Poets Prize and the Nebraska Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry. Grace's recent publications include poems in Southern Indiana Review and the anthology Nebraska Presence, short stories in The Los Angeles Review and Chariton Review, and a nonfiction essay in Santa Ana Review.

Alexandra Basolo
Professor, School of Biological Sciences

My research investigates evolutionary, behavioral and ecological processes that contribute to the maintenance of variation in the natural environment. Current research projects include laboratory and field work focusing on aspects of how natural and sexual selection contribute to the evolution of morphological, physiological and behavioral traits. My current research program includes:
Investigating how mate choice and predation affect the maintenance of genetic variation for age at sexual maturation and body size in the platyfish. Results thus far indicate that in populations with a high risk of predation, alleles for larger size and later maturation increase in frequency, while in low predation populations, alleles for early maturation at smaller sizes increase in frequency.
Examining the evolution of the sword in swordtail fishes. This research includes broad phylogenetic comparisons as well as manipulative experiments, directed at determining the costs and benefits of the sword, including energetic costs, predation costs and mating benefits. Results this far indicate that a female preference favoring a male sword appears to have evolved prior to the sword and is shared with a number of species lacking swords, and that multiple sources of selection act on the sword..
Investigating the evolutionary and ecological dynamics of a host/parasite system between hermit crabs and a parasitic castrator. This is a relatively new line of research, but results thus far indicate that the prevalence of the parasite varies both seasonally and spatially along the California coast.

Susan Belasco
Professor of English

Belasco is Professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies and Chair of the Department of English. Her research and teaching interests include nineteenth-century American literature and culture, women's literature, and humanities computing. Interested in the role of women writers in the literary marketplace of the nineteenth century, she is the editor of Margaret Fuller's Summer on the Lakes and Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall. She is the co-editor of "These Sad but Glorious Days": Dispatches from Europe, 1846-1850 by Margaret Fuller; Periodical Literature in Nineteenth-Century America; and Approaches to Teaching Uncle Tom's Cabin. Belasco is the editor of Walt Whitman's periodical poetry for the The Walt Whitman Electronic Archive and serves on the advisory board for The Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Culture Archive. Her most recent book is Stowe in Her Own Time.

Jennifer Brand
Professor, Chemical Engineering

Professor Brand's materials science research includes developing both new materials and new, more efficient materials production processes for deposition of thin films, microfibers (10 µm) and microparticles of commercial importance in advanced semiconductor and electronics devices, corrosion and wear resistant coatings, and catalytic support systems, with product morphology controlled by process parameters. Current investigations are ongoing in three areas: supercritical processing, boron carbide devices, and polymers for harsh environments.

Christina Brantner
Associate Professor, Modern Languages and Literatures/ German language, literature & culture.

Christina Brantner, Associate Professor (Ph.D. Washington-St. Louis) Christina has been at UNL since 1987. She received her Ph.D. at Washington University in St. Louis in 1987. Her areas of specialization are Romanticism, the interaction of music, literature and the arts, women writers and the translation of poetry. She has been the Program Director for the Berlin program since 1994.

Stephen Buhler
Aaron Douglas Professor of English

Dr. Buhler's professional interests include the literary culture of Early Modern England, especially the works of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton. Literature's connections with philosophy and the performing arts.
I regularly ask students to read aloud, recite, enact, or perform passages from literature. In encouraging them to bring the language more vividly to life in their own understandings and for their listeners, I share some of my own contemporary musical settings of early modern poetry. When the students respond in kind—a staged dramatic interpretation, a screenplay adaptation, or even an outdoor rally—it shows their grasp of the material and their engagement with it.
For me, the best part of teaching is learning: when everyone in a class, including the instructor, comes away from the experience knowing more (and more deeply) about the subject. Dialogue with students and with colleagues on campus, throughout the discipline, and across disciplinary lines provides both the inspiration and the environment for effective teaching and constructive research. I've found that work in the humanities especially depends not only upon individual insight and effort but also upon collaboration and conversation.

Beth Burkstrand-Reid
Assistant Professor of Law

Professor Burkstrand-Reid joined the faculty of the College of Law in 2010. Her current research focuses on how the assumption of nontraditional gender roles impacts the development of family law. Prior to her legal career, Professor Burkstrand-Reid was a journalist. Her writing has appeared in several newspapers, including The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal.

Tom Carr
Professor, Modern Languages and Literatures/ French

Professsor Carr (Ph.D. Wisconsin) teaches courses in 18th-century literature and Quebec literature and civilization. His research interests have focused on the history of rhetoric and Port-Royal. Besides articles on Voltaire, Malebranche, and Marivaux, he published Descartes and the Resilience of Rhetoric (Southern Illinois UP 1990) and an edition of Antoine Arnauld's Réflexions sur l'éloquence des prédicateurs (Droz 1992). Professor Carr has written a number of articles on the pedagogy of French civilization and participated in the AAFT's Acquiring Cross-Cultural Competence (NTC 1996). Recent articles have appreared in The French Review (Marivaux), Quebec Studies (Gabrielle Roy) and Rhetorica. His Voix des Abbesses du Grand Siècle: La predication au fémini á Port-Royal (Tubingen, Biblio 17) appreaded in 2006.

Joy Castro
Associate Professor of English and Ethnic Studies,

Joy Castro is an associate professor of English and Ethnic Studies and the associate director of the Institute for Ethnic Studies at UNL. Her short fiction, creative nonfiction, and poems appear in anthologies and in journals such as Fourth Genre, Seneca Review, Texas Review, Afro-Hispanic Review, North American Review, and the New York Times Magazine. Her critically acclaimed memoir The Truth Book (Arcade , 2005) investigates intersections of ethnicity, gender, class, religion, violence, and the body. She earned a B.A. at Trinity University in San Antonio and her M.A. and Ph.D. at Texas A&M University, and she taught for ten years at Wabash College in Indiana, where she offered courses on Latin@, Asian American, and African American literature, women's literature, literary modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, fiction writing, creative nonfiction writing, and race, class, and gender issues. An award-winning teacher, she publishes articles on innovative strategies for the post-secondary classroom, and her literary scholarship focuses on experimental women writers of the twentieth century such as Jean Rhys, Margery Latimer, Meridel Le Sueur, Sandra Cisneros, and Naomi Shihab Nye. Committed to broadening the reach of higher education to communities in need, she has offered free courses to at-risk teenagers, low-income adults, retirees, and victims of domestic violence. Personal website: http://www.joycastro.com

Sidnie White Crawford
Professor of Classics and Religious Studies/Hebrew Bible; Women & Theology

Sidnie White Crawford teaches in the areas of Hebrew Bible, Second Temple Judaism, Biblical Hebrew and feminist criticism of the Bible, Her courses include: Hebrew 201 and 202, Biblical Hebrew Prose and Biblical Hebrew Poetry, CLAS/RELG/JUDS 205, Introduction to the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, CLAS 286, Literature of the Ancient Near East, CLAS/RELG/JUDS 306, Second Temple Judaism, CLAS/RELG/JUDS 340, Women in the Biblical World, and CLAS/RELG/JUDS 408/808, Dead Sea Scrolls.
Professor Crawford's areas of scholarly expertise are in the Dead Sea Scrolls and textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible. She is a member of the international publication team for the Dead Sea Scrolls, responsible for editing fourteen manuscripts from the Qumran collection. She has written extensively on various aspects of the Dead Sea Scrolls, including the rewritten bible texts and the role of women in the Qumran community.
Professor Crawford's current research involves the textual criticism of the book of Deuteronomy. She is one of the general editors of the Oxford Hebrew Bible Project, which will result in an eclectic critical edition of every book of the Hebrew Bible. In addition to being the volume editor for the book of Deuteronomy, she is the general editor for the books of the Pentateuch. She is also involved in the Biblia Qumranica project, and will be contributing the volume on Deuteronomy for the series "The Bible at Qumran," to be published by E.J. Brill.
Professor Crawford is the President of the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeology in Jerusalem, the American school for the study of the Ancient Near East in Israel and the Palestinian Territories. The Albright Institute offers fellowships to graduate students and post-graduates to enable scholars to spend up to a year living and working in Jerusalem in a congenial scholarly atmosphere. The Institute also supports North American archaeologists excavating in Israel and the Palestinian Territories.

Dawne Curry
Assistant Professor of History and Ethnic Studies

Curry received her PhD in 2006 from Michigan State University. Her areas of study include 20th century protest and resistance studies in Africa, specifically South Africa, comparative black history, women and gender, and colonialism in Africa. In 2006 she published "An African American Constructs and Confronts the Social Construction of Race in Post-Apartheid South Africa" in Safundi: Journal of South African and American Studies, 2006: 22, April.

Meghan Davidson
Assistant Professor of Educational Psychology, Counseling Psychology Program

Davidson's research, clinical, and teaching interests focus primarily on interpersonal relationship violence, multicultural issues broadly defines, prevention, social justice and career development. Her current work includes creating a five-week career intervention for women survivors of domestic violence and evaluating a men's nonviolence program for men who batter and abuse women. Professor Davidson recieved her PhD in 2005 from the University of Missouri - Columbia.

Mary Jo Deegan
Professor, Sociology/Disability studies; classical & contemporary theory; history of sociology

Professor Deegan's areas of specialization include history of sociology (especially women), classical and contemporary theory, race relations, Chicago sociology, qualitative methods, culture and disability. She recieved her PhD from the University of Chicago in 1975.

Kwakiutl Dreher
Associate Professorm English, Ethnic Studies, African American women's literature, film & visual culture.

Dr. Dreher's research focuses on African American literature and film and visual culture. She recieved her PhD from the University of California-Riverside. Dr. Dreher has published in the Film Criticism journal and in the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and has presented various professional conferences.

Anne Duncan
Associate Professor of Classics and Religious Studies

Professor Duncan teachs a course on Gender and Sexuality in the Ancient World every other year. Dr. Duncan received her PhD in 2000 from the University of Pennsylvania. She has published articles such as "It Takes a Woman to Play a Real Man: Clara as Hero(ine) of Beaumont & Fletcher's Love's Cure." English Literary Renaissance 30.3 (2000) 396-407, and "Gendered Interpretations: Two Fourth-Century Performances of Sophocles' Electra." Helios 32.1 (2005) 55-79. Professor Duncan's first book, Performance and Identity in the Classical World , was published in 2006, and she is currently working on her second titled Actor Kings and King-Actors: Staging Absolute Power in Greece and Rome.

Christina Falci
Assistant Professor Sociology

My broad research objective is to understand the social determinants of mental health and health risk behaviors, and to provide insight into the social disparities in these health outcomes across population groups. My research, thus far, has primarily focused on health disparities across gender, social class and family structure in adolescence. I pay close attention to variation in social network structure, perceptions of social support, stress exposure and the self-concept across these populations groups. Systematic differences in these characteristics (the classic elements of the stress process) should provide insight into mental health disparities across population groups. Many mental health scholars argue for the incorporation of a life course orientation into the stress process model and my research fits within this emerging area of research. I also use social network theory and methods. For example, I study the direct and indirect effects of social network structure on adolescent health outcomes. I argue that social networks indirectly affect mental health by shaping perceptions of social relationships and regulating a person's health promoting or inhibiting behaviors. Social network structure is also likely to have a direct effect on health outcomes because not all aspects of social networks are visible. In other words, social network structure goes beyond individual perception.

My expertise in social network analysis has provided me with opportunities to engage in collaborative research projects outside of my primary substantive area of research interest. In the spring of 2008, I designed and fielded a network mapping and climate survey to all STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) faculty at UNL. Several research projects are being developed from these data, including two master theses. My project will investigate how faculty network structure varies by gender leading to gender disparities in access to resources and the amount of faculty workload from service and teaching responsibilities. It is often theorized that a lack of inclusion in social networks disadvantages underrepresented faculty (i.e., women) in STEM departments, but no research has empirically tested how network structure varies by gender in academia and whether or not it leads to disadvantage, in terms of research productivity, for women.

Gwendolyn Foster
Professor, English/Film studies; cultural studies; theory & criticism; women's literature; rhetoric

Professor Foster regularly teaches courses on Women Filmakers, Film Theory and Criticism, Postcolonial Film, Advanced Screenwriting, Film Directors, Women's Films, and Comedy Directors. Her areas of specialty include film, cultural studies, film theory, race, class and gender theory. In 2004, Dr. Foster was awarded the College of Arts & Sciences Distinguised Teaching Award.

Susan Fritz
Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs in the Office of the Provost

Susan Fritz earned her Ph.D. in Community and Human Resources at UNL in 1993. Fr. Fritz has a long history of research, teaching, and outreach in gender issues. She enjoys a national reputation amoing agricultural educators for her leadership and gender expertise.
Fritz provides leadership for the university’s multi-campus academic initiatives, working with faculty, administrators, policy makers and industry partners to advance research. She also organizes the review of new graduate programs and core research facilities and serve as liaison to the Nebraska Coordinating Commission on Post-Secondary Education.

Thomas Gannon
Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies, Ethnic Studies, and English

Gannon specializes in Native American literature, critical theory and eco-criticism. His Ph.D. is from the University of Iowa (2003). Professor Gannon teaches Native American Women's Literature, Native American Literature, and Literary/Critical Theory. In all his courses he focuses on Native-feminist writers such as Silko, Hogan, Harjo, on on ecofeminist theory.

Sarah Gervais
Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies and Psychology

Dr. Gervais has a dual Ph.D. in Psychology and Women's Studies from Penn State. After completing her post-doc at the University of Minnesota, Dr. Gervais joined the Psych/Law and Social Psychology areas at the UNL in Fall 2008. Sarah's research examines power and subtle prejudice. Examining behaviors like the objectifying gaze, flattery, patronization, and interpersonal confrontation, Sarah has found that the discriminatory acts of powerful people are often more subtle and nuanced than previously thought, but they still have negative consequences for recipients. Sarah also examines the relationship between subtle prejudice and public policy and law.

Amy Goodburn
Associate Vice Chacellor, Academic Affairs
Professor of English

Dr. Goodburn's research interests include ethnographic and teacher research and documenting and assessing teaching and learning in postsecondary classrooms. She co-coordinates UNL's Peer Review of Teaching Project, which was recognized in 2005 with a TIAA-CREF Hesburgh award for enhancing undergraduate teaching and designated an Institutional Leader in the Carnegie Advancement for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) Cluster. She has co-authored Inquiry into the College Classroom: A Journey Toward Scholarly Teaching and Making Teaching and Learning Visible: Course Portfolios and the Peer Review of Teaching and co-edited Composition, Pedagogy, and the Scholarship of Teaching. Her contributions to teaching have been recognized with a College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Teaching Award, the UNL Scholarly Teaching Award, and induction into the UNL Academy of Distinguished Teachers. She teaches courses in writing, rhetoric, literacy studies, and English education. Dr. Goodburn earned a BA in English and Political Science at Miami University, and MAs in English and English Education and a PhD in English (Composition and Rhetoric) from The Ohio State University. She joined the University of Nebraska-Lincoln faculty in 1994.

Iker González-Allende
Assistant Professor of Spanish, Department of Modern Languages

Professor González-Allende received his B.A. in Hispanic Philology from the University of Deusto (Spain) and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Spanish Literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He specializes in modern and contemporary Spanish peninsular literatures and cultures, with particular emphasis on gender studies and national identities. His major research interests are the Spanish Civil War, Basque narrative and the Republican exile. He has published articles on a wide array of subjects, including the poetry of Carolina Coronado, the memoirs of Carmen Baroja, the exile poetry of Ernestina de Champourcin and Francoist narrative during the Spanish Civil War.

Ruth Heaton
Associate Professor, Teaching, Learning and Teacher Education/Mathematics Education

Ruth Heaton is an associate professor in the Department of Teaching, Learning and Teacher Education at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her research interests in mathematics education are in the areas of teaching, teacher learning, and teacher knowledge. She is the author of Teaching Mathematics to the New Standards: Relearning the Dance, published by Teachers College Press, 2000. She was a co-principal investigator of Math Matters, an NSF-funded project designed to link the mathematical, pedagogical, and field experiences of prospective elementary teachers. Heaton has also been working in a successful school-university partnership for eight years with teachers from Lincoln Public Schools' Roper Elementary School. She is currently a co-principal investigator for the Math in the Middle Institute Partnership, an NSF-funded project designed to provide and study high quality professional development for middle school teachers with the long-term goal of improving K-12 student achievement in mathematics. She received her Ph. D. in mathematics education from Michigan State University. Prior to her work in higher education, Heaton taught elementary school for ten years.

Gwendolen Hines
Associate Professor, Mathematics and statistics/differential equations, dynamical systems, women and girls and mathematics

Dr. Gwendolen (Wendy) Hines started teaching at UNL in 1993 after she recieved her PhD from Georgia Tech. Her research focuses on the area of dynamical systems. Professor Hines is currently working on discretized delay equations and continuity of attractors and Morse sets with respect to discretization timestep. This work is in her paper with Tomas Gedeon entitled "Continuity of Morse Sets With Respect to the Discretization Parameter." She also teaches summer math camps for high school girls.

Mary Anne Holmes
Professor of Practice, GeoSciences/sedimentology, paleogeology, women in geosciences

Mary Anne is the Director of ADVANCE-Nebraska, University of Nebraska-Lincoln's NSF-funded ADVANCE program to increase the number of women faculty in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. This appointment grew out of her work on finding strategies to reduce the impact of gender barriers for women in the geosciences, which in turn grew out of her serving as President of the Association for Women Geoscientists (2000-2001). She is a Professor of Practice in the Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Department at UNL. She has sailed on five Ocean Drilling Program cruises to three oceans and studies how past climates and delivery systems determine the type of fine-grained sediment that accumulates on the seafloor and what clays in ancient soils tell us about past climates.

Melissa Homestead
Associate Professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies

Homestead received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, and she joined the faculty at UNL in 2005 as an associate professor of English. Her research focuses on the history of American women’s literary authorship from the Early Republic through the early 20th century. Her book American Women Authors and Literary Property, 1822-1869 examines how popular white women novelists negotiated copyright law and laws restricting the ability of married women to own property. She is working on two new projects. The first is a study of the career of Catharine Maria Sedgwick, a popular fiction writer of the antebellum period. The second is a study of Edith Lewis, a career woman who shared a home with novelist Willa Cather for nearly four decades (like Cather herself, Lewis spent most of her life in New York, but spent her childhood in Nebraska – she was born and raised in Lincoln, and she spent her freshman year at UNL before transferring to Smith College, a women’s college in Massachusetts, which, not coincidentally, is Dr. Homestead’s undergraduate alma mater). Dr. Homestead teaches undergraduate English classes on Willa Cather and on 20th-Century Women Writers, and she hopes to develop a 300 level cross-listed English and Women’s Studies class on 19th-century American women writers. When she’s not in Andrews Hall, you can find Dr. Homestead at the Holmes Lake Park Dog Run with her basset hound (Helen) and her short-legged mutt (Florence) or at home hanging out with her four cats (Isobel, Grace, Betty, and Marjorie).

Maureen Honey
Professor of Women's and Gender Studies and English

Honey is Professor of Women's Studies and English. Her specialization and interests include American Women’s Literature of the Twentieth Century, Harlem Renaissance, Women in World War II, and Popular Culture. She recently published "Bitter Fruit: African American Women in World War II" (University of Missouri Press 1999), "Double-Take: Cross-Currents of Gender and Genre in the Harlem Renaissance" (Rutgers University Press 2001) co-edited with Venetria Patton, ”Winnifred Eaton (Onoto Watanna)” in eds. Sharon Harris, Jennifer Putzi, and Heidi Jacobs American Women Prose Writers, 1870-1920 (Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gale Research Publishers 2000).” Erotic Visual Tropes in the Fiction of Edith Wharton” in eds. Candace Waid, Clare Colquitt, and Susan Goodman, A Forward Glance: New Essays on Edith Wharton (University of Delaware Press 1999). Honey had CNN interview on Rosie the Riveter, “Voices of the Millennium”, April 1999; consultant for NBC documentary “The Greatest Generation” hosted by Tom Brokaw, January 1999; consultant to the University of Kansas Spencer Museum of Art on the pin-up art of Alberto Vargas during World War II. She teaches Images of Women in Popular Culture, Twentieth Century Women Writers, Graduate Seminars in Edith Wharton, Early 20th Century American Women Writers, Women Writers and Art 1890-1930.

Margaret Jacobs
Associate Professor of History and Women's and Gender Studies

Professor Jacobs specializes in U.S. women's history, cross-cultural relations between women in the American West, and gender and colonialism. In 1999 she published Engendered Encounters: Feminism and Pueblo Cultures, 1879-1934. Her book, White Mother to a Dark Race, winner of the 2010 Bancroft Prize, examines the role of white women in both the United States and Australia in removing indigenous children from their families to institutions between 1880 and 1940.

Margaret Jacobs received a Visiting Fellowship in the Australian Centre for Indigenous History of the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University from June to August 2008. She will be undertaking collaborative work with members of the academic staff at the Centre and conducting research for her new project, tentatively titled "Dances with History". In this comparative study, she plans to explore how some indigenous groups in the American West, Hawaii, and Australia used dance as a means of conveying their histories. Most indigenous dances have been examined as expressions of the sacred or as a means of creating order and social control over the group. Margaret seeks to understand how dances could also convey history as defined and understood by indigenous groups. She wants to look in particular at attempts to restrict indigenous dances and what impact this had on how indigenous groups could tell their own histories to themselves and to outsiders. History-making and telling is a primary means of creating group identity and cohesion; thus, curtailing a group's means of telling its own history constitutes a potentially devastating colonial practice.

Michael James serves as the Ardis James Professor in Textiles, Clothing & Design at UNL and is the department's chair. He teaches in the area of textile design and quilt studies, and his own work in the medium of quilts has been recognized and exhibited internationally. It is included in the collections of the Museum of Arts & Design in New York City, the Racine Art Museum, and the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian, among others. He is a Fellow of the American Craft Council, and in 2009 was honored with the University of Nebraska's system-wide “Outstanding Research and Creative Activity” Award. Since 2002 he has focused his creative efforts on digital textile printing and its interface with the quilt as mixed media platform. He has twice co-chaired the International Quilt Study Center & Museum's biennial symposia and co-curated its 2009—2010 exhibition Perspectives: Art, Craft, Design and the Studio Quilt. He has been instrumental in bringing leading feminist artists to the UNL campus, including quilt artist Radka Donnell and painter Miriam Shapiro, the art world provocateurs The Guerrilla Girls, as well the ethologist Ellen Dissanayake, author of “Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why.”

Professor Jones' area of expertise if women's experiences in American, African and african American history. She has taught courses in these topics at SUNY Fredonia and SUNY Buffalo and is currently preparing an African American Women's History Course at UNL.

Alice Kang
Assistant Professor, Political Science and Ethnic Studies

Alice Kang has published on global trends in women's political representation, regional women's activism in Africa, and the gendered dimensions of oil production.  Her current research examines the conditions under which governments promote women's rights in Muslim African countries.  She teaches courses on women and politics, Africa, and a graduate seminar on comparative politics. 

Ann Kleimola
Professor, History/Russia & Eastern Europe; women's history

Dr. Kleimola recieved her PhD from the University of Michigan in 1970 with specialization in Medieval Russia, Eastern Europe, and women. Her current research project focuses on Women's Cultural Patronage Activities in Russia Early Slavic Veterinary Medicine.

Kathy Krone
Professor of Communication Studies

Dr. Krone's research speciality is Organizational Communication. Her currentprojects include Framing Intercultural Conflict in Sino-American Joint Ventures and Stakeholder Turning Points in Community Consensus-Building. Dr.Krone is involved in many service and administrative activities. She is Forum Editor, Management Communication Quarterly; Organizational Communication Past Chair, Division of the National Communication Association; Past Editorial Board Member for Management Communication Quarterly, Journal of Applied Communication Research , and Communication Studies; Member, Chancellor's Commission on the Statues of Women; Affiliate of The Mediation Center, Lincoln, NE. She also contributed curricular innovations by cultivating global awareness among students through international collaborative class projects. For example, in Fall 2005, undergraduate students worked with students from De La Salle University in the Philippines to develop a more culturally sensitive understanding of communicating leadership in global organizations.

Sharon Baum Kuska
Professor, Architecture/Bridges between architecture & civil engineering; vernacular architecture; gender issues in design professions

Dr. Kuska is a Registered Professional Civil Engineer and recieved her PhD from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Her research interests include studies involving issues and concerns related to both architecture and civil engineering, the relationship between architecture and civil engineering, rural architecture, bridges, and seismic design, covered bridge origins and design, four-square housing design and construction, and high-strength concrete column design.

She is currently working on research regarding Building Structures Along the Oregon Trail. Dr. Kuska and Professor Betsy Gabb conducted a photographic survey to document existing structures of popular design along the Nebraska section of the Oregon Trail. The project was supported by a grant from the College's Council for Community Planning and Design. Expected products include a future proposal to the Center for Great Plains Studies and juried publications in appropriate professional journals. Additionally, Kuska is involved in research for the NAFTA Architectural Educational Consortium with Professor Cecil Steward through a grant from the US Department of Education-FIPSE for a student exchange program with schools of architecture in Mexico and Canada

Stephen Lahey
Associate Professor,  Classics and Religious Studies

Lahey holds a Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut in the History of Philosophy and Historical Theology (1996). Among the courses he has taught are Ethics courses on race, gender, and animal rights issues, and at UNL, Contemporary Theology: Theologies of Liberation (including Black and Feminist Theology).

Margaret Macintyre Latta
Associate Professor, Center for Curriculum & Instruction

Margaret Macintyre Latta received her PhD from the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Teaching, Learning, & Teacher Education in the College of Education & Human Sciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her work foregrounds the integral role of aesthetic considerations such as attentiveness to participatory thinking, emotional commitment, felt freedom, dialogue, interaction, and speculation within the acts of teaching and learning. She terms these neglected epistemological assumptions, elemental to learners and learning. Her work emphasizes the primacy of teachers in the lives of their students and the long-term impact on the future, contributing to the scholarship regarding school curriculum, teacher education, and professional development reform initiatives. Currently, Margaret teaches graduate level courses that confront what ought to count as knowledge and experience given that 1) schools today are charged with the difficult task of educating an increasingly diverse student population and 2) teaching and learning are complex activities that can not be divorced from the social, cultural, and political contexts that frame individuals and classrooms. She is Co-Editor of the International Journal of Education & the Arts and recent publications can be found in the Journal of Teacher Education , Educational Philosophy & Theory, Teachers & Teaching: Theory & Practice, Studying Teacher Education, Education & Culture, Teaching Education, Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, and Teaching & Teacher Education.

Carole Levin
Willa Cather Professor of History

Carole Levin is Willa Cather Professor of History and she recently received a Distinguished Teaching Award. She received her Ph.D. from Tufts University and her areas of specialty are late medieval and early modern English, cultural, and women’s history. She teaches Women in European history, Saints, Witches and Madwomen, and a variety of other courses that deal with historical questions of gender and power. Her books include The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (1994), and, most recently, The Reign of Elizabeth I (2002). In 2003 she was an NEH Fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago. http://www.unl.edu/history/faculty/levin.html

Beth Lewis
Assistant Professor Teaching, Learning and Teacher Education, Assistant Professor of Science Education

Beth Lewis is began her professional life as a geologist and then a high school Earth & Space science teacher. At the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, she enjoys working with preservice and in-service teachers to provide students with authentic and inquiry-based science experiences. Her current research interests include science teacher professional development, geoscience education, and scientific literacy policy and practices.

Kristen Lucas
Assistant Professor of Communication Studies

Kristen Lucas (Ph.D., Purdue University) is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies. Her area of expertise is on workplace dignity, particularly as it relates to classed and gendered identity construction. Her research has been published in Women's Studies in Communication and the Sage Handbook of Gender and Communication. She also has dabbled in media effects research and has published a study in Communication Research that explains sex differences in video game play patterns from a gender communication perspective.

Karen Lyons
Associate Director of the UNL Honor's Program

Dr. Lyons teaches English 189H, ‘Great Love Stories’, in the fall semester and two UHON 395H classes, ‘It’s a Mystery’ and ‘Cultural Phenomena and the Arthurian Legend’, in the spring semester. Her areas of specialization include Women’s Literature, British Victorian Literature, and the Arthurian Legend.
She has served on the WGS Assessment Committee, and is the former chair of the Chancellor’s Commission on the Status of Women. She is currently a member of the Publications Board of the National Collegiate Honors Council, where her presentations at national conferences have covered a variety of Honors issues. Her most recent paper, entitled ‘The Victorian Medievalist’, was presented at the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Oxford University.

Christin Mamiya
Associate Dean, Hixson-Lied Fine and Preforming Arts; Professor, Art & Art History/Contemporary American and Oceanic art

Dr. Mamiya is currently Hixson-Lied Professor of Art History. She received her PhD in 1987 from the University of California, Los Angeles, and is an authoritative voice on contemporary art. Her book, Pop Art and Consumer Culture: American Supermarket (1992) serves as one of the definitive publications on that art movement. She also co-authored Gardner's Art Through the Ages, an award-winning publication that is the most widely used art history textbook. Her recent articles include "Nineteenth-Century French Women, the Home, and the Colonial Vision: Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique Wallpaper" in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies (2007), and "The 'Triumph' of American Art?: Pop Art in the Postwar World," to be published by in Internationalizing American Art: A Reader (Penn State University Press, forthcoming).

Mamiya received a College Distinguished Teaching Award in 1992, the Annis Chaikin Sorensen Award for Distinguished Teaching in the Humanities in 2001, and was selected for membership in the Academy of Distinguished Teaching at UNL in 2005.

Ann Mari May
Professor of Economics and Women's and Gender Studies

Ann Mari May is Professor of Economics with affiliate status in Women's Studies, History, and Agricultural Economics. She has published widely on issues in feminist economics and particularly in the area of women and higher education. Dr. May was a founding member of the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE) and serves as Executive Vice President and Treasurer of IAFFE. IAFFE is an international organization whose goal is to enhance the rigor and usefulness of economic inquiry by advancing research into economic issues affecting the lives of children, women, and men and its main office is located on the UNL campus. Dr. May has received numerous teaching awards including the Carnegie Foundation for the Advance of Teaching, Nebraska Professor of the Year Award, the Outstanding Teaching and Instructional Creativity Award (OTICA), and she is a member of the Academy of Distinguished Teachers. She teaches courses in nineteenth and twentieth century US economic history, economics, gender and social provisioning, the history of women and work in the US, and a doctoral seminar in feminist economics.

Patrice McMahon
Associate Professor, Chair Graduate Studies

Patrice McMahon's research interests include the causes and effects of ethnic identity on international relations, transnational determinants of domestic policy, democracy promotion, and human rights. Her work has appeared in Political Science Quarterly, Democratization, and Problems of Post-Communism. Recently, she finished American Foreign Policy in a Globalized World, edited with David P. Forsythe and Andrew Wedeman (forthcoming, Routledge Press) and Taming Ethnic Hatred: Ethnic Cooperation and Transnational Networks in Eastern Europe (under review).

Julia McQuillan
Professor, Sociology/Gender, marriage & family, mental health & illness

Julia McQuillan earned her Ph.D.(1998) from the University of Connecticut. She came to UNL as an Assistant Professor of Sociology in 1998. She became interested in applied research in 1992 and had several research related positions in graduate school. In 2005, she was promoted to associate professor in the Sociology department. Julia enjoys researching gender and disease related problems and is part of the research team that obtained the 5-year NICHD Family Choices (infertility) project that the BOSR is currently conducting.

Helen A. Moore
Professor of Women's and Gender Studies and Sociology
Editor of Teaching Sociology and A Quarterly Journal of the American Sociological Association

Moore is Professor of Women's Studies and Sociology. She is also Editor of Teaching Sociology and A Quarterly Journal of the American Sociological Association. Moore's recent publication includes “Multiple perspectives on multimedia in the large lecture classroom.” Teaching Sociology 37: 92 -103, 1999. (with Pippert, Tomothy), "The Sociology of Women: The Intersection of Patriarchy, Capitalism and Colonization." New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. (Second Edition), 1998. First edition, 1992, and “Campus racial climate policies: The view from the bottom up.” with M.Miller, R. Anderson, E. Perez and J. Harms Cannon. Race, Sex & Class 5:76 - 90, 1998. Her recent grant achievements are 2000-02 - American Sociological Association/American Council of Colleges and Universities. Preparing Future Faculty Project. $40,000. Co-Principal Investigator. 2000 - American Sociological Association Teaching Improvement Grant to support travel of co- editors of a special issue of Teaching Sociology on HBCUs to Washington, D.C. Moore was honored by 2000 UNL Academy of Distinguished Teachers. Appointed, VC Academic Affairs, 2000 University of Nebraska System wide Outstanding Teaching and Creativity Award and 1999 UNL Ronald E. McNair Outstanding Undergraduate Mentor Award. Courses that she offers include Sociology 200 Women in Contemporary Society (Summer 2000), Sociology 490/890 Sociology of Women, Sociology 496/896 Family Violence (Spring, 2001), and Sociology 998 Seminar: Women of Color and Social Justice: Research and Theory (Fall 1999).

Anchalee (Joy) Panigabutra-Roberts
Catalog & Metadata Services Librarian / Multicultural Studies Team Member, Love Library

Susan Poser
Dean, College of Law

Susan Poser is the Dean and the Schmoker Professor of Law at the UNL College of Law. She received her B.A. in Ancient Greek and Political Science from Swarthmore College, her J.D. from Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and her Ph.D. in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program from the University of California, Berkeley with a dissertation on the remedial phase of desegregation litigation. After law school, Poser was a law clerk to Chief Judge Dolores K. Sloviter of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. She practiced law in Philadelphia and was the Zicklin Fellow in Ethics in the Legal Studies Department of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. In Spring 2004, Poser was a visiting professor at the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. Poser's research interests include professional responsibility, with a focus on Multijurisdictional and Multidisciplinary Practice. She has written and spoken widely on these issues. In 2003, she served as the Reporter to the Nebraska State Bar Association Committee that reviewed the Model Rules of Professional Conduct and proposed their adoption in Nebraska. In 2004, Poser became the director of the Robert J. Kutak Center for the Teaching and Study of Applied Ethics. Professor Poser has also published articles on tort law and has participated in empirical research and scholarship on the effects of tort rules. She has been a member of the Women's and Gender Studies Faculty, the Chancellor's Commission on the Status of Women, and she served as Chair of the NU Systemwide Gender Equity Committee. She is a member of the Pennsylvania and Nebraska bars and serves on the Ethics Committee of the Nebraska State Bar Association. In 2003, Poser was awarded the Law College Distinguished Teacher award. In 2004 Poser was elected to the American Law Institute and in 2006 she received the Shining Light Award from the Nebraska State Bar Foundation. From 2007-2010, Poser served as the of Chief of Staff and Associate to the Chancellor at UNL. Poser became Dean of the College of Law in May 2010.

Linda Pratt
Executive Vice President & Provost; English

Linda Ray Pratt was Professor and Chair of the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln before assuming the position of Executive Vice President and Provost of the University of Nebraska . Dr. Pratt received her Ph.D. from Emory University and has published widely on issues in higher education and in her scholarly field of Victorian and Modern Poetry. She has served as president and vice president of the national American Association of University Professors and as Chair of the Association of Departments of English. In 2000-01 she was Interim Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at UNL. Dr. Pratt has won a Distinguished Teaching Award, and in 1994 she received the James A. Lake Academic Freedom Award from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

John Raible
Assistant Professor, Teaching, Learning and Teacher Education

John Raible (EdD, University of Massachusetts-Amherst) teaches courses on multicultural education and family diversity. The goals of his research agenda are to investigate the links between various identities and relationships that transcend lines of difference, to forward research-based multicultural education practices, and to strengthen interracial and cross-cultural alliances and relationships within and between diverse families, schools, and communities. He has gained experience tackling the problems of multiculturalism in public schools while he taught in the Navajo Nation in New Mexico, in Compton, California, and in Ithaca, New York. He has presented at numerous conferences for adoptive parents, social workers, educators, researchers, and others across North America. Dr. Raible has also appeared in the award-winning films Struggle for Identity: Issues in Transracial Adoption and A Conversation 10 Years Later . Raible's recent publications include "Real brothers, real sisters: Lessons from the non-adopted white siblings of transracial adoptees" in the Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless, 2008, vol. 17, issues 1 & 2, "Transracialized selves and the emergence of post-white teacher identities" in Race, Ethnicity and Education , 2007, vol. 10 Issue 2 (co-authored with J. Irizarry), and "Lifelong impact, enduring need" in Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption 2006, South End Press.

Allison Reisbig
Assistant Professor Child, Youth and Family Studies

Loukia Sarroub
Associate Professor, Teaching, Learning and Teacher Education

Professor Sarroub's areas of interest include literacy, language and culture and discourse across home and school contexts; anthropology and education; cross-cultural studies; immigrant communities in the US and Europe; youth cultures; ethnography and qualitative research methods, ethnicity and gender in education; education policy and social analysis.

Since 2001, she has been working on an multi-year ethnographic project related to school success, literacy, and low socioeconomic youth populations. The purpose of this cross-cultural research is to examine cultural, language, and literacy practices that may either hinder or support the intellectual, social, and socioeconomic success of low SES students at home and school. Sarroub is conducting fieldwork in a community that includes refugees from Iraq and am exploring youth and family literacy practices in and out of school. She is also examining how "reading" is taught at the high school level to accommodate both ELL populations, such as the Iraqis and other refugees, and American students who struggle with literacy. In conjunction with the microanalyses of the fieldwork, Dr. Sarroub is doing archival research on refugee and immigrant populations in the United States and Europe and interviewing individuals who are part of humanitarian efforts. She anticipates writing a book based on this research, tentatively titled Transnationalism in the Middle: Glocality, Literacy, and Schools.

Julia Schleck
Assistant Professor in English and Women's Studies

Professor Schleck's interests and research include Renaissance literature, travel writing and early modern colonial writing, Renaissance music, history of science, genre studies, and cultural materialism/Marxism. She is additionally researched Queer Theory, and particularly queer approaches to Renaissance literature. She regularly teaches courses on Shakespeare, Renaissance Literature, and Intro to Literary Study. Julia Schleck is currently working on a book that examines early modern English travel and news reports treating the Ottoman Empire and Persia.

Anna Shavers
Professor, College of Law; Law/Immigration; gender issues; access to legal remedies

Professor Shavers joined the faculty of the University of Nebraska College of Law in 1989. She received her B.S. degree from Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio and her M.S. in Business from the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she was elected to membership in the Beta Gamma Sigma Business Honor Society. She received her J.D. degree (cum laude) from the University of Minnesota where she served as Managing Editor of the Minnesota Law Review. She was admitted to the Minnesota Bar in 1979 and the Nebraska bar in 1989. Other positions include: Associate, Faegre & Benson Law Firm, Minneapolis, MN 1979-83; Director of University Student Legal Services, University of Minnesota, 1983-86; Associate Clinical Professor, University of Minnesota, 1986-89. While at the University of Minnesota, Professor Shavers established that law school's first immigration clinic. She has also served as a mediator and arbitrator and has a strong interest in alternative forms of dispute resolution. Professor Shavers teaches Administrative Law, Immigration Law, Gender Issues and Civil Procedure and is faculty co-advisor to the Multi-Cultural Legal Society and BALSA.

Professor Shavers believes that she has found the position for which she is ideally suited. She thoroughly enjoys the interaction with students. She also enjoys having the time to devote to reading and questioning various aspects of our legal system. Her primary interest is the area of immigration and its intersection with gender issues. This area appeals to her because of her appreciation of the differences of people from various cultures.

She currently serves as a Board Member of the Midwestern People of Color Legal Scholarship Conference, Inc., Liaison for the ABA Administrative Law Section to the ABA Commission on Immigration and Publication Chair of the ABA Administrative Law Section. She has previously served as Chair of the AALS Section on Immigration Law, a Council Member and Immigration Committee Chair of the ABA Administrative Law Section. member of the ABA Commission on Law and Aging and member of the ABA Coordinating Committee on Immigration Law. She is a frequent national and international presenter on immigration and administrative law issues.

Victoria Smith
Associate Professor, History, Ethnic Studies/Native American history

Professor Smith is a 19th century Native American historian. Her areas of concentration concern what some have termed "marginal" Indians, as contrasted with tribal histories. Professor Smith is interested in Native Americans who were often found on the front edge of colliding cultures. For example, she has a long-standing interest in Indian scouts and police, Indian captives, intermarried Indians, as well as mixed-blood Indian histories. Professor Smith's first book, a collaboration with Mr. Hollis Stabler, is entitled No One Ever Asked Me: The World War II Memoirs of an Omaha Indian Soldier (Nebraska Press, 2005). Her second book, Captive Arizona: Indian Captives and Captive Indians in Arizona Territory, 1850-1912 is under contract with the Nebraska Press and will be forthcoming in late 2007. Professor Smith is currently the faculty advisor for the University of Nebraska Inter-Tribal Exchange (UNITE), as well as the Edgerton Junior Faculty Chair. Professor Smith is a Cherokee and Delaware descendant.

Shari Stenberg
Associate Professor and Faculty Leadership for Writing Initiative Coordinator

Whether I am working with first-year or graduate students, we collaboratively explore how our rhetorical practices can shape the classroom, our discipline, and our culture. My hope is that students feel enabled to contribute to conversations that invigorate them as well as to critically reflect on the choices they make in doing so. I approach the discipline as a shared space in which students and teachers come together to debate, dialogue, and build knowledge. My goal is not to simply share my own knowledge, but to facilitate others’ knowledge-making. Inevitably, what I know is altered as a result.

Likewise, I work with new and developing teachers to investigate the visions and ideals that shape our pedagogies, and to approach teaching, like writing, as always in process.

Finally, my work with the Faculty Leadership for Writing Initiative allows me to combine my commitment to writing and teaching development to promote enhanced writing instruction across the university.

Alison Stewart
Professor, Art & Art History/Medieval, Northern Gothic, & Renaissance art; gender & visual arts in early modern Europe

Professor Stewart specializes in Northern Renaissance printed works of art on paper. She teaches courses on Medieval and Northern Renaissance art, and the early history of prints. Her research has centered around secular imagery of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Germany and the Netherlands, including peasant festivals, and has been supported by Fulbright and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships.

Isabel Velázquez
Assistant Professor of Spanish

Her dissertation, Intergenerational Spanish language transmission: Attitudes, motivations and linguistic practices in two Mexican American communities , explores the ways in which parents' attitudes and linguistic experience influence household language use policies. Her area of research includes: Sociolinguistic variation, Hispanic linguistics, bilingualism and language acquisition, heritage speaker pedagogy, language contact on the U.S./Mexico border, and the role of language in identity formations of US Latina/os.

Her article "Intergenerational Spanish Transmission in El Paso, Texas: Parental Perceptions of Cost/Benefit", was included in a special volume of the journal Spanish in Context , and is currently in press. Her current research focuses on issues of linguistic maintenance and loss among Latino families in the Midwest. She joined UNL's Department of Modern Languages and Literatures in the fall of 2008, and currently teaches a graduate seminar on Spanish in the United States and an undergraduate course in Hispanic linguistics.

LuAnn Wandsnider
Associate Professor, Anthropology and Geography/ archaeology of U.S. Great Plains & India; pastoral ecology& Archaeology

Wandsnider's areas of specialization includes archaeological method and theory, archaic-late prehistoric of the North American high plains, traditional food preparation, spatial analysis, quantitative methods (GIS, EDA), formation of the archaeological landscape, and pastoralist land use systems

Dr. Wandsnider's research has three main themes. The first of these is concerned with the Late Prehistoric time period on the High Plains. In Northwestern Nebraska, her research has focused on the appearance and disappearance of pit hearth technology, which was widely used from AD 250 through AD 1000. The ability of the this material record to comment on gender systems, land tenure, subsistence strategies, and so forth is the subject of her research here.

A second emphasis is that of the formation, documentation, and analysis of archaeological landscapes. She has worked in southern India, using ethnoarchaeological methods to monitor land parcels that participate in an agropastoral land use system. Other recent methodological work is concerned with spatial analysis of archaeological distributions that relies on results from actualistic studies. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and associated technologies (GPS, remote sensing) play an important role in this work.

Most recently, she has initiated work to understand the relationship between traditional cooking systems, food biochemistry, and nutrition. This work ties directly into understanding significant subsistence shifts documented archaeologically and genetically in the human genome.

Wendy Weiss
Professor, Textiles, Clothing, & Design/handwoven textiles

Professor Weiss teaches courses in textile design including woven and non-woven textile construction and surface design. She also periodically teaches in the interdisciplinary Visual Literacy program.

Weiss has also been the Robert Hillestad Textiles Gallery Director since 1996, where she works with faculty to develop local and international exhibitions and educational programs for diverse audiences. The gallery is dedicated to the presentation of contemporary and historic examples of textiles and apparel.

Donna Woudenberg
Post Doctorate Drought Management Specialist

Donna joined the National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC), housed within UNL's School of Natural Resources, in January 2007. She assists in social, economic, and environmental drought impact-related research and contract work at local, state, national, and international levels. Donna has a strong interest in meteorology and climatology, a strong interest in sociology, psychology, and anthropology, and a strong interest in interdisciplinary research. Areas of research interest include: Human Interactions with the Environment; Perception of the Drought Hazard; Social Impacts of Drought; Social Impacts of Climate Variability and Climate Change; Bridging the Gap between Science and Decision-Making; Education and Outreach; Interdisciplinary Coursework and Research; Women's, Children's & Minority Issues as related to the Environment; and Global Sustainability and Equity. Donna teaches a course of her own design (Individual & Cultural Perspectives on the Environment) for the Environmental Studies Program, and currently teaches courses for the Women's & Gender Studies Program, as well. She is currently developing and teaching online course modules (Global Climate Change for Educators) as part of a NASA grant. Donna is also involved in community education and outreach — particularly in the development of K-12 educational materials and in outreach materials/projects related to drought, Nebraska's water resources, and to climate, climate variability, and climate change at multiple levels.

Tamy Burnett
Lecturer, English

Dr. Burnett's areas of interest are Twentieth century American literature and culture, gender in popular culture, television and film studies, women’s and gender studies, science fiction and fantasy, online and e-teaching. She is Coordinator of Online Teaching Resources for the UNL English Department. She recieved her PhD in English with a sepcialization in Women's and Gender Studies from the University of Nebraska. Tamy teaches Women in Popular Culture, Women Filmmakers, and Intro to Women’s and Gender Studies.

Kris Gandara
Lecturer, Women’s and Gender Studies

Amber Harris Leichner
Lecturer, English and Women’s and Gender Studies

Amber Harris Leichner is a PhD candidate in 20th-century American Literature with a specialization in Women's and Gender Studies. Her research interests include Cather/Wharton Studies, multi-cultural 20th-century women writers, and the teaching of writing and literature. Amber's work has appeared in Cather Studies 9 (2011) and Teaching the Harlem Renaissance (2008). Her poems have appeared in journals such as The Dos Passos Review and Relief, and she is the author the chapbook Just This Proof (FootHills Publishing, 2006). Amber teaches courses in writing, literature, and women’s and gender studies.

Carly Woods
Lecturer, Communication Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies

Dr. Woods studies the intersecting rhetorics of identity, power, and difference in public argument and address. As a rhetorical historian and critic, Woods blends insight from feminist, cultural, and communication theory to explore the coalitional strategies of historically marginalized groups. She is currently working on a book project that examines debating societies as gendered sites of citizenship and rhetorical education in nineteenth- and twentieth-century public culture.

Jan Deeds
Director, Women’s Center; Associate Director in Student Involvement, Gender Programs

Jan has a doctorate from UNL in Educational Studies with a specialization in Educational Leadership in Higher Education, and received a master's degree in Counseling Psychology from UNL in 1985. Her research interests include masculinities and men's studies, violence prevention and risk reduction, feminist therapy, and body image.
She considers the work of Student Involvement Gender Programs and the Women's Center as opportunities for students to apply what they are learning in WGS courses. She has developed and adapted several workshops, such as "Reconstructing Barbie and Ken" and "Sexpectations", and invites students to be trained as peer educators to co-facilitate the workshops. She collaborated in 1999 with Athletic Department staff members to create "PREVENT", the relationship violence peer education group for student-athletes and non-athletes. In 2011 she accepted the role of advisor for "SHINE", the body image, eating disorders, and wellness peer educators. Dr. Deeds is on the board of directors of the American Men's Studies Association and developed the "Introduction to Men's Studies" course that she will teach in the spring semester of 2012

Pat Tetreault
Assistant Director in Student Involvement; Director, LGBTQA Resource Center

At the LGBTQA Resource Center Pat, provides consultation and assistance on LGBTQA and social justice issues; meets with individuals to assess needs and circumstances and provide assistance and referrals; works collaboratively to develop resources based on needs assessments and requests; and provides presentations and workshops, facilities, outreach, education, and programming to raise awareness about LGBTQA and social justice issues and to cultivate a safe, respectful and inclusive campus community for all people of all sexual orientations and gender identities/expression.

Pat has a doctorate in Social Psychology with an emphasis in Cognition and Psychology of Women, and completed a post-doctoral fellowship in the Law-Psychology Program at UNL earning a Master of Legal Studies degree. She also completed a Master of Arts degree in Experimental Psychology. Pat’s work experience includes survey development and needs assessment; human sexuality; diversity and social justice education; and health education and promotion.