News Archives

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2016

  • Janet Hyde has won the prestigious Ernest R. Hilgard Award. This well-deserved honor recognizes Janet’s  lifetime contributions to the broad field of Psychology.
  • An international team of experienced researchers, coordinated by Aili Mari Tripp, will examine Women and Peacebuilding in Africa, supported by $961,600 grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
  • The 2016 faculty awardee in the academic advising is Myra Marx Ferree, professor of sociology and gender and women’s studies, for her support of many minority and first-generation graduate students. She is a community builder, and a central figure with “Femsem,” a collaborative and supportive network of feminist scholars on campus.
  • Congratulations to Keisha Lindsay, assistant professor of political science and gender and women’s studies, for being one of the recipients of the 2016 Distinguished Teaching Award.
  • Susan Stanford Friedman, director of the Institute for Research in the Humanities and Hilldale Virginia Woolf Professor of English and Women’s Studies, was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa as an honorary member.
  • Araceli Alonso has been awarded an L&S Academic Staff Mid-Career Career Award! This is well-deserved recognition for the important work that Ara does to improve the lives of people in Madison and across the globe.
  • Sophia Friedson-Ridenour, a postdoctoral fellow with the Center for Research on Gender and Women at UW-Madison, has been honored with a 2016 Wisconsin Without Borders award. Friedson-Ridenour has been awarded Recognition in Community Based Research for her research on the empowerment of women in rural agriculture.

2015

  • Caroline VanSickle, the 2014-2016 GWS Wittig Postdoctoral Fellow in Feminist Biology, played an integral role on the team that discovered Homo naledi in Africa. Read more about this amazing find here and here.
  • Janet Hyde, Director of the UW-Madison’s Center for Research on Gender and Women, joined Ben Barres, chair of neurobiology at Stanford University, Catherine Dulac of Harvard University, Melissa Hines of University of Cambridge, and Norman Spack of Boston Children’s Hospital to discuss gender identity as part of a series with Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel on the brain on the Charlie Rose show. Here is a link to that episode.
  • Congratulations to Assistant Professor Jenny Higgins on winning the 2015 Emil Steiger Award.
  • Congratulations to Professor Jane Collins on winning the prestigious 2015 Hilldale Award in the social sciences.
  • Pernille Ipsen‘s recently published book Daughters of the Trade: Atlantic Slavers and Interracial Marriage on the Gold Coast(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) examines the history of the production of race in the Atlantic world. The book follows five generations of marriages between African women and European men in an Atlantic slave trading port on the Gold Coast to illustrate how intermarrying with Europeans opened a special position for Euro-Africans in the increasingly stratified Atlantic World.
  • Janet Shibley Hyde, Evjue-Bascom Professor, Helen Thompson Woolley Professor of Psychology and Gender & Women’s Studies, was recognized by the American Psychological Association as a Distinguished Leader for Women in Psychology. Congratulations to Janet on this amazing honor.
  • Aili Mari Tripp was awarded the African Studies Association Public Service Award in recognition of her rescue of the organization from dire financial straights and collapse during her presidency in 2012.
  • Congratulations to A. Finn Enke for their promotion to Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and History.
  • Congratulations to Ellen Samuels for being awarded tenure. She is now an Associate Professor of English and Gender & Women’s Studies.

2014

  • Pernille Ipsen‘s article, “‘The Christened Mulatresses’: Euro-African Families in a Slave-Trading Town,” has won the Mary Maples Dunn Prize for the best article in early American women’s history by an untenured scholar published in the William and Mary Quarterly. The prize committee found it “theoretically innovative and engagingly written, providing a fresh and rich reading of gender, sexuality, household, and family.”
  • BIOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGIST CHOSEN AS WITTIG POSTDOC IN FEMINIST BIOLOGY
    Caroline VanSickle, who is completing her Ph.D. in biological anthropology at the University of Michigan, has been selected as the inaugural Wittig Postdoctoral Fellow in Feminist Biology. VanSickle studies female hominins by investigating changes in pelvis shape – and therefore childbirth anatomy – over the course of human evolution. Her upcoming research will focus on South African australopithecine species dating from 1.5 to 3 million years ago. She joins the Department of Gender & Women’s Studies in September and will teach a course on gender and biology each semester, with the rest of her time devoted to research and absorbing knowledge from the Department.
  • Study challenges claims of single-sex schooling benefits As many American public school districts adopt single-sex classrooms and even entire schools, a new study finds scant evidence that they offer educational or social benefits. The study was the largest and most thorough effort to examine the issue to date, says Janet Hyde, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
  • Ethelene Whitmire’s received one of our Feminist Scholar awards to take time to finish the book Regina Anderson Andrews, Harlem Renaissance Librarian which has been released. “Ethelene Whitmire’s new biography offers the first full-length portrait of Andrews’ activism, engagement with the arts of the Harlem Renaissance, and work with the NYPL.”
  • Gender, Violence, and Human Security: Critical Feminist Perspectives
    Edited by Aili Mari Tripp, Myra Marx Ferree, and Christina Ewig
    “As the authors of Gender, Violence, and Human Security demonstrate so convincingly, we cannot fully understand the meaning of human security without applying an intersectional gendered lens. This important book should be read by all those concerned with enlarging the theoretical frameworks, as well as the policy prescriptions, for human security.”
    —J. Ann Tickner, author of Gender and International Relations
  • Myra Marx Ferree’s book Varieties of Feminism: German Gender Politics in Global Perspective (Stanford University Press, 2012) has won the American Political Science Association’s Victoria Schuck Award (best book on gender in 2012.) Read more…

2013

  • Jenny Higgins has received the NIH-funded BIRCWH award (Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women’s Health)! This prestigious multi-year grant gives her protected research time while allowing her to teach one course a year for GWS.   We are thrilled to have Jenny represent GWS within this select group.

2012

  • Christina Ewig and Jenny Higgins have been named as winners of the 2012-13 Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholars Program prize for Best Research in Health & Society.

2011

  • Coming full circle, new graduate makes a difference in women’s health. On Sunday, May 15, Wren Keturi graduated from UW-Madison with a bachelor’s degree in gender and women’s studies with an emphasis on biological anthropology. Less than 24 hours later, she put her degree to work.
  • Lynn Nyhart, Professor of History of Science and Gender & Women’s Studies Affiliate, has won a Guggenheim Fellowship!  Her project, Parts and Wholes: The Biological Individual in the Nineteenth Century, proposes a new history of individuality as a fundamental problem underlying mid-nineteenth-century biology and explores how science mediated questions of autonomy, interdependence, and hierarchy within a rapidly modernizing Europe
  • Cyrena Pondrom, Professor of English and Gender & Women’s Studies, has received the 2011 Phi Beta Kappa Award for Excellence in Teaching.  UW undergraduates –many– nominated her for this award.
  • Nina Valeo Cooke, Gender and Women’s Studies Academic Adviser, has won the prestigious L&S Advising Award!
  • Christina Ewig, Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, has won a Vilas Associate Award for her new research on gender and the Left in Latin America.

2010

  • Professor Lynet Uttal was awarded a Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Grant and Morgridge Match Challenge Grant on Preventing Domestic Violence in Latino Communities in the Fall of 2010.
  • Christine Garlough (Assistant Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and Folklore) was awarded a Vilas Life Cycle Professorship to advance her research with grassroots women’s groups in India.
  • Jane Collins (Professor of Community and Environmental Sociology and Gender and Women’s Studies) and her book Both Hands Tied, on women and welfare in Wisconsin, are featured in Katha Pollit’s column in the May 31 edition of the Nation Magazine.
  • Myra Marx Ferree (Martindale-Bascom Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for German and European Studies and affiliated faculty for Gender & Women’s Studies), Aili Tripp (Professor of Political Science and Gender & Women’s Studies and Director of the Center for Research on Gender and Women), and Christina Ewig (Assistant Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and Political Science and Associate Chair of Gender & Women’s Studies) together with other faculty won a Sawyer Seminar award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The seminar, Globalization and the New Politics of Women’s Rights, will be conducted in the 2011-2012 academic year. The award includes, among other things, a post-doctoral fellowship, 2 dissertation fellowships, and guest speakers.
  • Maria Lepowsky, Professor of Anthropology and Gender and Women’s Studies was awarded a Feminist Scholars Fellowship from the Center for Research on Gender and Women and a Resident Faculty Fellowship at the UW Institute for Research in the Humanities.  During the 2010-11academic year Lepowsky will complete a book entitled Toypurina and the Hidden Histories of California.  Lepowsky’s manuscript focuses on a young female shaman, Toypurina, who in 1785 led her Tongva people and their allies in a revolt against the Spanish at Mission San Gabriel, east of the new pueblo of Los Angeles.  Drawing on century-old anthropological fieldnotes, wax cylinder recordings of sacred songs, family stories, oral histories and participant observation in present-day ceremonies, Lepowsky narrates the history of Toypurina and the legacies of her revolt.  In the process, Lepowsky re-envisions California history by placing indigenous Californians at its center.  In addition, she shows how today Toypurina is becoming a regional symbol of indigenous, Chicana/Chicano and feminist resistance to injustice.
  • Anne Enke, Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, History and LGBT Studies was awarded a Feminist Scholars Fellowship from the Center for Research on Gender and Women.  This fellowship is designed to provide UW-Madison faculty working on feminist scholarship a one semester full-time research appointment.  During the Fall of 2010, Enke will work on: “Gender Changes: Transfeminist Activism from the 1960s to the New Millennium”.  Enke describes this project as “a history of transfeminist activism that establishes the integral relationship between feminist and transgender movements beginning in the 1960s”. Enke will trace how a movement calling for freedom of gender expression and transsexual rights took form within and alongside feminism. Like feminism, transgender liberation was deeply invested in the workings of gender, sexuality, and bodies, but its relationship with feminism was regularly contested. Focusing on grassroots movement-building, one of Enke’s driving questions is why, when transgender people were so often key leaders and participants in feminist efforts, the larger feminist trajectory is one of gender dis-integration as well as integration. Rather than ceding the definition of feminism to trans-exclusive frameworks, Enke is compelled by feminism’s challenges to gender hierarchy, and by the feminist history of transgender movement-building, to offer a new historical framework that sees their interdependence.
  • 1000th major in Gender and Women’s Studies to be awarded this spring. Gender and Women’s Studies’ 1000th major will graduate this spring! Between graduates of the Gender and Women’s Studies major and certificate Gender and Women’s Studies has nearly 2,500 alumni. What great milestones! Join us in celebration on Thursday, May 6th. Cake will be served in 102 Ingraham on Thursday, May 6th throughout the day.
  • Florence Ebila, PhD Student in African Languages and Literature and Teaching Assistant for Gender and Women’s Studies 102 has won an International Fellowship for Graduate Students from the American Association of University Women for 2010-11.  Congratulations Florence!
  • On March 19-20th the Gender and International Policy Research Circle – a research circle on the UW-Madison campus supported by Global Studies and the International Institute – together with the Center for Research on Gender and Women and several UW area studies programs organized a workshop featuring cutting edge work engaging with the study of human security from a gendered perspective.  Human security moves beyond traditional notions of security to consider the effects on human well-being of conflicts of all kinds – not just violent conflict but also environmental degradation, economic decline and other phenomenon that put people and communities at risk.  The workshop hosted over 80 US and international-based participants, from more than 13 institutions including other UW system campuses. At the workshop, undergraduate students, graduate students and faculty debated the relationship between gender and human security and the relevance of the human security framework for advancing our understanding of the relationship between violence and women’s and men’s well-being.  Speakers included Narda Henríquez (Catholic University, Peru), Valerie Sperling (Clark University), V. Spike Peterson (University of Arizona) and Fionnuala D. Ní Aoláin (University of Minnesota Law School).
  • Chancellor Biddy Martin ends Nike licensing relationship as a result of not complying with the labor code of conduct. UW-Madison continues to be a leader among colleges and universities to curb sweatshop abuses in licensed-apparel manufacturing, an industry that employees mainly women.
  • Professor Judy Leavitt received a Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award!! We certainly know first-hand how much she deserves it! Congratulations, Judy. This is a great honor for a great teacher.
  • GWS Associate Lecturer, Araceli Alonso, has been named a UW-Madison’s Outstanding Women of Color honoree for 2009-2010 for her work building community to create an inclusive and respectful environment on and off campus. Many congratulations!!!
  • GWS Associate Lecturer, Araceli Alonso, together with two UW Undergraduate students in March won a Wisconsin Idea Grant
    for the distribution of mosquito nets through Alonso’s mobile health project in rural Kenya called “Health by Motorbike”. Congratulations!!!
  • Hot of the Press! GWS Faculty member Jane Collins in March, published Both Hands Tied: Welfare Reform and the Race to the Bottom in the Low-Wage Labor Market (with Victoria Mayer), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.  Read more here.  The book, on women and welfare in Wisconsin, was featured Katha Pollit’s editorial in the May 31, 2010 edition of the Nation Magazine.
  • Gender and Women’s Studies undergraduate students are connecting the classroom with the community! Each spring up to 15 Gender and Women’s Studies students participate in GWS 660: Internship in Gender and Women’s Studies. In this 6-credit course, taught by Nina Valeo Cooke, MSW, students are able to apply theory from the classroom into practice in our community while gaining professional experience with a number of community-based agencies. Agencies have come to anticipate the “hiring” of a GWS intern because our students bring a wealth of information and dedication to their work in the community.

2009

  • Professor Judith Walzer Leavitt’s latest Book Make Way for Daddy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009) is making a splash popular press! It has been featured in the Wall Street Journal,  (June 2009), and the Atlantic (November 2009).
  • Associate Professor, Anne Enke is making news with her recent book Finding a Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space and Feminist Activism (Durham: Duke University Press 2007).  Ann Snitow, of the Women’s Review of Books, writes: “I wish Enke could go back to her amazing spaces with a camera and make a documentary about the women she has written about…Enke has made a brilliant political contribution here. I hope she finds many forms in the future to communicate the texture of political experience and the depth of her insights about how we all walk the shifting spaces of this world.”  Read here for the full review.
  • Articles by Gender and Women’s Studies Professors Anne Enke and Christina Ewig have drawn international attention. Anne Enke’s article “Living With Gender” was translated into Mandarin and published in the November, ’09 issue of the Forum for Gender and Women’s Studies Journal out of National Taiwan University.  Christina Ewig’s article “Reproduction, Re-Reform and the Reconfigured State: Feminists and Neoliberal Health Reforms in Chile” was translated into Polish, and published in a volume edited by Ewa Charkiewicz and Anna Zachorowska-Mazurkiewicz, titled Gender i ekonomia opieki. (Warsaw: Biblioteka Think Tanku Feministycznego, 2009).

2008

2007

  • Assistant Professor Christina Ewig was interviewed and quoted by Judith Davidoff of the Capital Times regarding gender and the Presidential Primary elections in “Gender Card: Local Women Say Clinton Should Stick to the Issues.” Thursday, November 29, 2007. p.1.
  • Assistant Professor Christina Ewig was invited to participate in the roundtable “Voices of Courage: Women, Politics and Leadership” organized by Madison Speak Out Sister Young Women’s Leadership Forum (based at Madison West High School) and targeted at Madison area high school girls of color. November 15, 2007. Madison WI, Monona Terrace.

2006