Honors continue to roll in for faculty in the Department of Women’s & Gender (WGS) Studies, located in the College of Arts and Sciences. Vivian May, associate professor and chair of WGS, says the latest round of achievements reflect the cutting-edge feminist scholarship and pedagogy for which the department is known, nationally and internationally. Recent WGS faculty achievements include:
Himika Bhattacharya
Assistant Professor Himika Bhattacharya is in high demand in India, evidenced by her recent invited talk at the Center for South Asian Studies at Calcutta University; her facilitating an ethnography workshop at Ambedkar University in Delhi; and her work as a feminist pedagogies educator for E-QUAL (Enhancing Quality, Access and Governance of Undergraduate Education in India), an international collaborative funded by the European Union. She also has an article on the politics of memory forthcoming in the journal Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism.
Pedrp DiPietro
Assistant Professor Pedro DiPietro is a consultant at the Latin American Social Sciences Institute (also known as FLASCO) in Argentina, where he developed a multimedia workshop on feminist pedagogies in digital environments. He recently co-authored an article with members of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization in the journal Cuadernos del Área de Género, Sociedad, y Política (FLACSO-Buenos Aires 2014) and has an article forthcoming in the feminist geography journal Gender, Place, and Culture. He also gave an invited talk at SUNY Oneonta on Latina feminisms, as part of the Dr. Ralph R. Watkins Speaker Series.
Vivian May
The inaugural recipient of the LGBT Resource Center’s Social Justice Recognition Award, Vivian May is recent author of “Pursuing Intersectionality, Unsettling Dominant Imaginaries” (Routledge, 2015); a chapter on Anna Julia Cooper in “North Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times” (University of Georgia Press, 2014); an article on Harriet Tubman in the journal Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism; and an article about intersectionality in the journal Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy.
Chandra Talpade Mohanty
Distinguished Professor Chandra Talpade Mohanty, currently serves as co-principal investigator with Linda Carty (associate professor, African American studies) on a $500,000 Mellon Foundation grant: they also have a co-authored book chapter forthcoming in the “Oxford Handbook on Transnational Feminist Movements.” Mohanty recently participated in Skidmore College’s Karen Levin Coburn ’63 Lecture Series. Her address, “Transnational Feminist Dialogues on Neoliberalism and Radical Praxis,” was part of Skidmore’s ongoing efforts to promote the importance of gender studies. Mohanty also contributed a chapter to “The Truly Diverse Faculty: New Dialogues in American Higher Education” (Palgrave, 2014).
Dana Olwan
In recent months, Assistant Professor Dana Olwan has received multiple recognitions for her work in transnational feminist theories of race, gender and religion. She received a fellowship from the Palestinian American Research Council, underwriting her study of gender violence and “honor crimes,” and was awarded the Lilian Robinson Scholar Award from the Simone de Beauvoir Institute of Concordia University in Montreal. Olwan also recently published two book chapters (one in “Muslim Women, Transnational Feminism and the Ethics of Pedagogy” [Routledge, 2014] and another in “In the Name of ‘Honor’: Responding to Violence against Women From Socio-legal and Policing Perspectives” [Palgrave, 2014]), and she has an article forthcoming in “Feral Feminisms” and a co-authored article forthcoming in “Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture, and Social Justice.” Lastly, with co-author Tamara Lea Spira, she has just completed an extensive report to the Association for Women’s Rights in Development titled “Decolonizing Funding for Indigenous Women’s Organizations.”
Gwendolyn Pugh
Associate Professor Gwendolyn Pough and her co-editor Elaine Richardson (Ohio State University), have been working on a forthcoming issue of Social Identities focused on hip-hop literacies. Pough was recently elected to a five-year term on the executive committee of the Modern Language Association’s Division on Popular Culture: she was also elected to the advisory board for the Coalition of Women Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition. In Fall 2014, Pough gave a plenary address titled “Bad Rhetorician” at the annual Cultural Rhetorics Conference at Michigan State University, and an interview with Pough about her work was published in Composition Forum.
Assistant Professor Robin Riley published an essay, “Race, Gender and Rescue: Reading News about Palestine, Iraq, and Syria,” in the Middle East Women’s Studies Newsletter that draws on her acclaimed book, “Depicting the Veil” (Palgrave, 2013). Riley also was invited to speak from her book and larger body of research on the politics of representation at SUNY Oswego’s Ernest & Young Lecture Series on “Gender Equity in the Workplace.”
“Realizing a more just world, whether in one’s research, teaching or service, is at the heart of what feminist scholar-educators do,” says May, who also currently serves as president of the National Women’s Studies Association. “Here at Syracuse, I am truly honored to work with such a dynamic faculty. They are gifted scholars, passionate educators and committed activists.”
