Graduate Consortium of Women's Studies

About

The Mother Board and Past Faculty

The ‘Mother Board’ consists of the six founders, feminist faculty who conceptualized and brought the GCWS into existence. The GCWS continually relies on their institutional knowledge, insight, and expertise in feminist scholarship to push us forward. From their originating vision in 1992 we receive energy and insight into ways the GCWS can deepen its impact among faculty and students at our member institutions and beyond. Their advice, outreach, and support continue to be critical to growing our faculty and student participation base.

In addition to the Mother Board, the advice and participation of past and present faculty is essential to us as we built on our curriculum, initiating courses that are responsive to the contemporary developments and debates in the field of Women’s and Gender Studies.

The GCWS Mother Board Members Are:

Carol Hurd Green is Associate Professor of English at Boston College. Formerly an associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences, she continues to have responsibility for the Arts and Sciences interdisciplinary programs while directing the Donovan Urban Teaching Scholars in the Lynch School of Education. She currently teaches in the Boston College Capstone program.

Joyce Antler is the Samuel Lane Professor of American Jewish History and Culture at Brandeis University, where she teaches in the American Studies Department and Women's and Gender Studies Program. Her major fields of interest include women's history, American Jewish history and culture, the history of education, and history as theater.

She is the author or editor of ten books, including, most recently, You Never Call! You Never Write! A History of the Jewish Mother. With Elinor Fuchs, she is the author of the prize-winning documentary drama, Year One of the Empire: A Play of American Politics, War and Protest, which was performed off-Broadway in 2008. She lectures frequently on women's history and on the Jewish American experience, and tours with her daughter, comedian Lauren Antler, with a program about Jewish mothers and daughters.

Alice Jardine is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. Her research interests include 20th and 21st century French and Francophone literature, feminist theory, Women, Gender and Sexuality studies, postmodern and trnasmodern theories of culture and society, and the American 1950s. She has authored or edited six books, including Men in Feminism (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), Shifting Scenes: Interviews on Women, Writing, and Politics in Post-68 France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), and Living Attention: On Teresa Brennan (New York: SUNY Press, 2007) among others.

Ruth Perry, Professor of Literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is an internationally acclaimed authority on eighteenth-century English literature and culture, women's writing, and feminist theory, and has lectured all over the world on these subjects. The author of numerous books and articles, she has written on such canonical figures as Pope, Sterne, Richardson, and Austen as well as on contemporary women writers such as Grace Paley and Mary Gordon. Elected president of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in 2000, she has also served on the Advisory Board of the PMLA (Publications of the Modern Language Association), The Women's Review of Books and Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature. She is a professor of Literature at MIT where she founded the Women's Studies program in 1984 and the Boston Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies in 1992. She has been awarded grants by the NEH and the NSF for projects on the social context of science, and has held the prestigious Woodrow Wilson fellowship as well as fellowships from the Bunting Institute, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Rockefeller Foundation at Bellagio. Her books include Women, Letters, and the Novel; Mothering the Mind: Twelve Studies of Writers and Their Silent Partners; an edition of George Ballard's 1752 Several Ladies of Great Britain; The Celebrated Mary Astell; and Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Culture and Literature 1748-1818. She is completing a volume of essays on Jane Austen and a modern edition of Charlotte Lennox's Henrietta (1758). A singer of ballads, her current research and teaching interests include the history of collecting, preserving, and performing folk music --particularly in eighteenth-century England. She is editing a double issue on "Ballads and Songs in the Eighteenth Century" for The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation and has begun work on a biography of Anna Gordon Brown, an eighteenth-century singer of traditional ballads.

Laura Frader is Professor of History and the Chair of the History Department at Northeastern. She specializes in French social and labor history and European women's and gender history. and has written extensively on these topics. Her publications include Gender and Class in Modern Europe (co-edited with Sonya O. Rose, 1996), and Peasants and Protest: Agricultural Workers, Politics and Unions in the Aude, 1850-1914 (1991), Race in France: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Politics of Difference (with Herrick Chapman) and Breadwinners and Citizens: Gender in the Making of the French Social Model (forthcoming), as well as many articles in English and French-language journals. Her articles and review essays have appeared in the International Review of Social History, the Journal of Social History, Signs, History and Theory, Social Science History, and Social Politics, as well as in several French language journals. She has served on the editorial boards of The Journal of Modern History, French Historical Studies and French Politics, Culture and Society.

In addition to her position at Northeastern, Professor Frader is a Senior Associate at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University and is a founding member of the Graduate Consortium in Womens' Studies at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She has held visiting professorships at the Ecole des Hautes etudes en Sciences sociales in Paris, at the University de Paris VIII, and at the University of Aston, Birmingham, UK.

Christiane Zehl Romero is Professor of German and Rhetoric and director of the German Program at Tufts University. Her research interests include the twentieth century, women writers, film, and advanced language. She is the author of four books and has worked and published extensively on the German writer Anna Seghers.

Barbara Haber served as Curator of Books at the Radcliffe Institute's Schlesinger Library at Harvard University. She developed a major collection of over 16,000 volumes on cooking and food. She established the Radcliffe Culinary Friends and sponsored lectures and panel discussions by food-world notables. To further promote the study of food, se served as senior advisory editor and contributed chapters on culinary history to the Cambridge World History of Food and the Encyclopedia of the History of American Food and Beverages published by Oxford University Press. She has written on food topics for numerous magazines and publications and has published several books on food studies including From Hardtack to Home Fries: An Uncommon History of American Cooks and Meals and Women in America: A Guide to Books.

Graduate Consortium of Women's Studies

About

The Mother Board and Past Faculty

The GCWS Mother Board Members Are:

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