WGS looks back at the academic year

Photo Credit: 2018 2019 year in review graphic
by Brooke Adam June 12, 2019

The 2018-2019 academic year was filled with awards, publications, and events for Women’s and Gender Studies.  With the school year over and summertime here, we reflect on our successful year. 

Awards

The WGS programs has an incredible array of faculty, staff, and campus associates in our midst. It is no surprise that 2018-2019 brought several awards for our members.

Rose Holz

In September 2018, Rose Holz was named a faculty fellow for student success. At the end of the academic year, she received the McClymont Distinguished Teaching Fellow award and was promoted to professor of practice.

Amelia Montes (English and Ethnic Studies) published “Defining La Rumorosa and Borderlands”, a memoir excerpt, in Fifth Wednesday Journal and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

Shari Stenberg's (English and Director of WGS) article “‘Tweet Me Your First Assaults’: Writing Shame and the Rhetorical Work of #NotOkay” was selected for the Best of the Journals in Rhetoric and Composition 2019 in March.

Kristen Hoerl (Communications Studies) received the American Studies Division 2018 Best Book Award  for The Bad Sixties: Hollywood Memories of the Counterculture, Antiwar, and Black Power Movements (University Press of Mississippi) at the National Commination Association annual convention in Salt Lake City in November.

The Bad Sixties book cover

Pat Tetreault (Director of the LGBTQA+ Resource Center) and her co-authors won the LGBTQ Non-Fiction category best book at the American Book Fest for their publication Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Americans at Risk.

Margaret Jacobs

Margaret Jacobs (History) was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She and her team received a three-year Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Implementation Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities as well. 

Research and Recognition

Along with awards, several in our community published their research this year. 

Iker González-Allende, (Modern Languages and Literatures) published the monograph “Hombres en movimiento: Masculinidades españolas en los exilios y emigraciones, 1939– 1999” [“Men in Motion: Spanish Masculinities in Exiles and Migrations, 1939-1999”] (Purdue University Press, 2018).

Jennifer McKitrick (Philosophy) published a chapter entitled “Feminist Metaphysics: Can this Marriage be Saved?” in the Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism.

Holz and Chelsea Richardson (a PhD student Philosophy and WGS) lead teaching workshops on “How to Teach the Abortion Debate Without Setting Off Any Bombs: Lessons from the 1939 Dickinson-Belskie Birth Series Sculptures.”  They presented at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference in Atlanta, GA in November 2018.

Other members were recognized for their work in the news.

Catherine Medici-Thiemann (WGS Lecturer) was quoted in Slate magazine. In this article, Medici-Thiemann responds to questions regarding prescription anti-anxiety medication during pregnancy.

Holz was interviewed by the Daily Nebraskan on teaching and researching abortion in a judgement free environment.

Events

Not only did our faculty share their research, but we brought other scholars and leaders to the university campus to share their work with our students.

Fall

Roxane Gay

In conjunction with the Department of English, we welcomed Roxane Gay, bestselling author of Hunger and Bad Feminist and UNL Alumna, for our Fall Colloquium Series on October 4th.

Jaclyn Friedman, feminist author and sex educator, was also welcomed as one of our Fall Colloquium speakers on October 8th. She gave a lecture titled “How to Have Sex Without Getting Hurt or Being a Jerk.”

On October 29th, we co-sponsored the Mary Martin McLaughlin Memorial Lecture. Tracy Adams of the University of Auckland presented “Agnès Sorel and the Creation of the French Royal Mistress”.

Spring

On March 8th, we hosted No Limits 2019: Being the Future, Riding the Next Feminist Wave. This year’s conference featured Shireen Ghorbani, a former candidate for the US House of Representatives and Associate Director of Communication and Organizational Development for Facilities Management at the University of Utah. Fifty students from Nebraska and Missouri presented their work at the conference.

No Limits graphic

On April 9th, we co-hosted the 2019 Linda and Charles Wilson Humanities in Medicine Lecture with the Department of Communications. Lara Freidenfelds, author of The Modern Period, gave a lecture titled “Perfect Pregnancies & Mourned Miscarriages: A History of Modern Childbearing.”

Student Achievements

Harper Anderson was awarded the WGS Outstanding Undergraduate Achievement Award.

Gillian Anderson received the Dean's Experiential Learning Scholarship.

Three undergraduate majors and sixteen WGS and LGTBQ/Sexuality minors graduated from the Women’s and Gender Studies program in December. Nine graduate students, eight undergraduate majors, and 21 WGS and LGTBQ/Sexuality minors graduated from the Women’s and Gender Studies program in May.

We are very thankful for the wonderful students, faculty and guests that comprise Women's and Gender Studies. Thank you to all who have been a part of our year. We look forward to getting back in the fall.