Courses

Workshop for Dissertation Writers in Women's and Gender Studies

FALL & SPRING, Tuesdays, 1:00 - 4:00 PM / 9.9.08 - 5.5.09

A writing workshop for dissertation writers.  Classes will include presentation and discussion of students’ work-in-progress.  Discussion will move back and forth between theoretical considerations and practical ones as we address three subjects central to dissertation work: the archive, methodology, and rhetoric.  Each student will be asked to reflect on ways that feminism and gender studies affected her discipline’s views of its appropriate archive and on the question of what archive of materials is best suited to answer the questions raised in her dissertation.  We will also consider general issues of scholarly method, methodological issues that feminism and gender studies have raised, and methodological issues prominent within the disciplines of participants’ different disciplinary fields.   The inquiry into rhetoric will ask how a dissertation writer convinces various audiences that her work is significant.  Each student will also give an oral presentation to the group that has been self-consciously adapted for an interdisciplinary audience.  Enrollment is limited to ten students

FACULTY

Susan Staves is Paul Proswimmer Professor Emerita of Brandeis University.  Her scholarly interests have centered on English literature and history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  She is the author of /Player’s Scepters: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration/, /Married Women’s Separate Property in England, 1660-1833/,  /A Literary History of Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660-1789/, and articles and essays on literary, legal, historical, medical, and musical subjects.

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Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 14N-211
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139
Phone: 617-324-2085