Notes from the Department Head
This fall term has been full of ‘welcomes’ – and many more than usual.
We welcome new department members and welcome additions to the families of existing department members, Women’s Studies Council members and a graduate student. We welcome newly arrived graduate students and an array of invited speakers, all of whom have come to us ‘from away.’ We also welcome an anticipated name change, from the Department of Women’s Studies, to the Department of Gender Studies. This change is not official yet, but we’ll keep you updated and let you know when it becomes official. As you know, we’ve been discussing the department name for some time now and many of you have been a part of these discussions. You’ve participated in consultations and in some instances, you’ve facilitated them. You’ve written to us and offered your ideas and opinions about our name. This discussion has afforded us with an opportunity to involve undergraduate students, graduate students, alumnae, faculty members and retired faculty members in a larger conversation and we thank you for your contributions. Along with the anticipated name change, we anticipate that there will be some exciting new course developments, to be announced soon.
In this newsletter, we introduce new department members, Dr. Siphiwe Dube and Dr. Deborah McPhail, who join us for 2011-2012. Two graduate students have also recently joined the Master’s program, Jessica Khouri and Christina Young.
This term, the Department will host four speakers. All are from outside of the province and had never before travelled to Newfoundland and Labrador. It is great to be able to introduce them to the university, and to the city. Dr. Carolyn Kyler, Director of Gender and Women’s Studies at Washington and Jefferson College, in Washington, Pennsylvania launched the annual Speakers’ Series with a talk titled, “Gender and Graphic Memoir.” Dr. Jo Drayton, an Art Historian in the Department of Design, UNITEC Institute of Technology in Auckland, New Zealand, spoke about “Synergies between Two Great Seafaring Cultures: Maori and Viking,” and she also spoke about her research with Ted Blades, on the CBC program, On the Go. Dr. Leslie Kern, from the Department of Geography and Environment at Mount Allison University, New Brunswick gave a talk titled, “Seduction and the ‘the Scary City’: Gendered Imaginings of Urban Revitalization.” Dr. Kern recently sent us a copy of her book, Sex and the Revitalized City (UBC Press, 2010), which can be borrowed from the Sally Davis Seminar Room (SN 4087).
Professor Rebecca Johnson will be our final visitor this term. Appointed to the Faculty of Law, University of Victoria, she will be visiting us via London, England, where she is currently on sabbatical. Professor Johnson’s teaching interests are in the areas of constitutional law, criminal law, feminist advocacy, social/legal theory and law and film. A law and society scholar, her teaching and research involves issues of intersectionality and particularly the practices of power operating at the intersection of law and culture. We are especially grateful to the Office of the Vice-President (Research) and the Office of the Dean of Arts for their support in co-hosting Professor Johnson’s visit as the 2011 George M. Story Lecturer in the Humanities.
This fall, we launched a new program, Majors Mondays! Held on the last Monday of each month, we invite Majors and Minors in the Department of Women’s Studies to get together, socialize and to have fun. We’ve taken up some new and varied activities, from feminist colouring books, to pumpkin carving. The last Majors Mondays event, Love Letters to Feminism, of this term will be held on Monday, 28 November 2011 at noon and we encourage you to come along.
Congratulations to recent graduates at Fall 2011 convocation and to recent award winners in the Department of Women’s Studies, including those who were named to the Dean’s Honour List and to the Department Book Prize Winner, Charlotte Mitchell.
In addition to all of these events this term, we’ve continued to offer Professional Development sessions for graduate students on the topics of grant writing and supervision, to meet incoming scholarship students over dinner, to meet with graduate students and members of the Advisory Graduate Studies Committee for a bar-b-que, and to meet with each other at the Blue Castle Salon, over conversations about “women, culture and the spaces of the imagination.”
We’ve also working to confirm speakers for the Speakers’ Series 2012; please check the Department web site for the dates and times. All talks will be held in the Sally Davis Seminar Room (SN 4087) and are open to the public.
By the time December rolls around, we’ll be ready for a rest, and then, we’ll be ready to begin all over again in January!
Katherine Side
Head, Department of Women’s Studies