Wednesdays 3:00-6:00PM

Spring 20201

Note: This course will be held remotely and synchronously. The GCWS schedule is different than the start/end date of spring courses on each campus. This is because each campus starts their semester at different times and we try to find the time frame that best accommodates nine universities. We work with graduating students to ensure grades are submitted by the deadline; non-graduating students will have a grade filed within 10 days of the end of the course.

Feminist Inquiry is an interdisciplinary exploration of feminist ways of learning, thinking, collaborating, listening, and speaking in the interest of producing innovative scholarship and meaningful public engagement. Our seminar will study feminist approaches, theories, and epistemologies that form the intellectual framework necessary to conduct feminist research both within and across the disciplines. Students will produce a range of written work based on their course reading and research—for example, primary and secondary source analyses, teaching documents, and an academic article-quality research essay. We will learn to understand and teach our respective research foci through a feminist lens, and to extend this feminist approach into our public engagement outside academia.

Given the range and diversity of feminist inquiry, the course will not attempt to examine all areas of the field; instead, we will study a curated selection of works that range from the classic to the innovative. Throughout the course, we will consider the complexity and multiplicity of modern feminisms while learning to understand the core power dynamics of feminism across place and time.

Faculty

Anne M. Blaschke is a historian of twentieth-century U.S. political culture. She teaches in American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston and in Boston University’s Writing Program. She specializes in gender, race, capitalism, diplomacy, and sport. Blaschke has published academic articles on U.S. political economy, diplomatic engagement, athletes' immigration, and civil rights. She also writes publicly for the Washington Post’s Made by History column and other outlets. She is revising her first book, Foxes, Not Oxes: Women’s Athletics in American Political Culture, for publication. Title IX—the 1972 law mandating sex equality in American education—is the subject of her second book project.

Roberta Micallef is a professor of the practice with a joint position in World Languages and Literatures and Women Gender and Sexuality Studies in Boston University. Her area of study is 19th and 20th century Ottoman Empire and Turkish women’s narratives oral, written and visual. Micallef is currently working on early modern travel narratives.