Our faculty come to Gender & Women's Studies by various paths and with diverse interests. These women care deeply about what they teach, and inspire and empower students every day.
"I remain convinced today, as I was the day I arrived at Minnesota State Mankato, that this is a great place to do women's studies. The institutional support, the vibrant student culture, and the collegial atmosphere make this a wonderful place for feminists to work, study, and create social change."
- Chair of Gender & Women's studies
- Associate professor
- Current research: "Manfood," exploring the depiction of masculinity on the Food Network
- Activist: issues include rape crisis advocacy and LGBT rights work
- Non-profit: co-chair of South Central Minnesota Pride, Inc., which promotes visibility and pride for the LGBTA communities of greater Mankato (http://www.scmnpride.com)
- National board member: chair of Ethics, Equity, and Diversity for the National Women's Studies Association; board member of Committee Against Domestic Abuse (CADA)
- Author: Rape on the Public Agenda: Feminism and the Politics of Sexual Assault (Northeastern University Press, 2000)
- Author: numerous articles and book chapters on gender-based violence and LGBT politics
- Ph.D.: Women's Studies, Emory University
"It is exciting to be a part of a gender & women's studies department and community that values intellectual work as well as activism. I enjoy being part of a long tradition of feminist teaching, learning, and collaborating at Minnesota State Mankato."
- Associate professor
- Ph.D.: Ohio State University; Post-Doctoral Fellowship: Florida International University
- Fulbright recipient: participated in a study abroad program on Women in Contemporary India in 2005
- Managing Editor: Journal of Women's History (1999-2001)
- Primary interests: gender, sexuality, and history
- Author: Sex Goes to School: Girls and Sex Education before the 1960s (University of Illinois Press, 2008)
- Cool project: worked with students to produce the Coming of Age in the Twentieth Century multimedia website (http://www.mnsu.edu/mngirls), featuring stories of growing up female in the past 100 years
- Current research: gay and lesbian studies courses in the 1970s and 1980s
- Assistant professor
- Global student: Los Angeles, Scotland, Michigan, San Francisco.
- Innovator: created an educational outreach program about women's lives internationally for underserved communities as a Fellow the International Museum of Women in San Francisco
- Researcher: intertwining of the familial and the imperial in the British Caribbean from the nineteenth-century to the present and feminist mothering
- Teacher: graduate and undergraduate courses on Global Feminism and international issues
- Specialty: global feminist theory and analysis
- Essayist: topics include contemporary Caribbean culture and mothering
- Co-editor: Before Windrush: Recovering an Asian and Black Literary Heritage Within Britain (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008); Mothers Who Deliver: Feminist Interventions in Public and Interpersonal Discourse (SUNY Press, 2009)
- Ph.D.: English and Women's Studies, University of Michigan
- Assistant professor
- Academic activist: pursued an interdisciplinary Women’s Studies Ph.D. when there were few such programs available and only a handful of doctorates in the field.
- Researcher: relationships between love and knowledge as related to imperialist power, public spheres, and social transformation and justice; intersections of whiteness, class, sexuality, gender, and nation; and women’s and gender studies methodologies
- Urban resident with rural beginnings: resided in Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, New York City, and Minneapolis among other cities and was raised in the rural midwest
- Specialty: intersectional and transnational feminist theory and analysis, knowledge theory, social ethics, and whiteness studies
- Essayist: topics include anti-racist pedagogies, relations between love, knowledge, colonialism, and feminism, and the disciplinary epistemologies and methods of women’s and gender studies’
- Teacher: graduate and undergraduate courses on feminist theory, intersections of gender, race, and class, politics of the body, "free love" sex radicalism, feminist philosophy, feminist film studies, love studies
- Published: in Hypatia: a Journal of Feminist Philosophy, in Feminist Waves, Feminist Generations: Life Stories from the Academy, and in NWSA Journal (forthcoming, Summer 2010)
- Memoirist: currently writing Seeking Life: The Baby Project, a feminist memoir about motherhood and cultures of reproduction
- Ph.D.: in Feminist Studies, University of Minnesota
- Pre-doctoral fellow
- Trailblazer: our first Gender & Women's Studies department Pre-Doctoral Fellow.
- Humble: helen chooses not to capitalize her name because she says she is "a work in progress"
- Hails from: Jackson, Mississippi
- Ph.D. candidate: Feminist Studies, University of Minnesota
- Teacher: Introduction to Women's Studies, Coming of Age: Gender & Culture
- Plans to teach: intertextual conversations between literary texts and women's personal and maternal narratives
- Interests: black feminist and diaspora theories
- Other interests: women of color fiction, place, migration, maternal, and quest narratives; the feminist and theoretical implications of identity in women's speculative and detective fiction
- Research topics: diasporic narrative structures and the significance of identity, gender, and home in black women's fictions
Maria Bevacqua
Susan Freeman
Jocelyn Fenton Stitt
Dawn Rae Davis
helen crump