Rachel Lee

Rachel C. Lee, Professor of English, Gender Studies, and the Institute for Society and Genetics at UCLA, specializes in Asian American literature, performance culture, and studies of gender and sexuality. She is the author of The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies (NYU, 2014), The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation (Princeton University Press, 1999), editor of The Routledge Companion to Asian American and Pacific Islander Literature (Taylor Francis, 2014), and co-editor of the volume Asian America.Net: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Cyberspace (Routledge University Press, 2003).  Lee has held a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley, and a UC Humanities Research Institute Fellowship.  As CSW Associate Director, she headed a multi-year research project, “Life (Un)Ltd,” addressing the question of what impact recent developments in the biosciences, biotechnology, and in clinical practice have had on feminist studies, especially those theorizing the circulation of population data and biomaterials in relation to race and (neo)colonialism.

Elizabeth Marchant

Elizabeth Marchant is an Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Comparative Literature. She also serves on the Faculty Advisory Committee of the interdisciplinary program in Latin American Studies.  She earned her doctorate in Spanish and Portuguese from NYU, master’s degrees in Latin American Studies and Spanish and Portuguese from Stanford, and her bachelor’s degree from Smith College.  Professor Marchant is the author of Critical Acts: Latin American Women and Cultural Criticism (University Press of Florida, 1999).  She recently co-edited Comparative Perspectives on the Black Atlantic, a special issue of Comparative Literature Studies.  In 2005, she was a recipient of the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award.  She has also taught at UCSB, Brandeis University, NYU, and Stanford.  At UCLA, she has served as the Chair and Graduate Vice-Chair of the Women’s Studies Department, Director of the Brazil Travel Study Program, and Chair of the Latin American Studies Program on Brazil.  Professor Marchant currently is completing a book entitled, Brazil and the Black Atlantic: Cultural Inclusion and Citizenship, which examines contemporary Afro-Brazilian expressive culture as a means to re-conceptualize the notion of the “Black Atlantic.”

Kathleen McHugh

Kathleen McHugh is a Professor in the Department of English and in the Cinema and Media Studies program of the Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media at UCLA.  Her most recent book is Jane Campion (University of Illinois Press, 2007), which examines the subversive style of the woman who has become one of the world’s greatest film directors. She is the author of American Domesticity: From How-To Manual to Hollywood Melodrama (Oxford University Press, 1999), the co-editor of South Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre, and National Cinema (Wayne State University Press, 2005), and the co-editor of a special issue of SIGNS on “Film Feminisms.” She has published articles on domesticity, feminism, melodrama, the avant-garde, and autobiography in Cultural Studies, Jump Cut, Screen, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Velvet Light Trap.

As director, McHugh developed many new programs to support and expand CSW’s mission to develop, promote, and disseminate faculty and student research on gender, sexuality, and women’s issues. McHugh launched the Faculty Curator and Faculty Development Grants to strengthen the connection between faculty research and CSW programming. McHugh developed and implemented the CSW Graduate Student Initiative and established the Irving and Jean Stone Fund, which acknowledged scholar and CSW affiliate Jean Stone’s long-term relationship with and support for CSW. McHugh also created a Publications Unit, which produced CSW Update, an online/PDF newsletter, and a weekly email digest with information on upcoming talks, conferences, and announcements. As part of CSW’s large-scale research project on “A History of Women’s Social Movement Activities in Los Angeles, 1960–1999,” McHugh developed a project with the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives to inventory, organize, preserve, and digitize several key Los Angeles-themed collections. To address the challenges facing the fields of women’s studies, gender and sexuality studies, post-colonial studies, ethnic studies, and LGBT studies in the coming years, McHugh developed a year-long project in association with the NYU Center for the Study of Gender. The project resulted in two sister conferences; the first, New Majorities, Shifting Priorities: Difference and Demographics in 21st-Century Academy, was held at UCLA on March 4, 2011. The second conference, entitled New Majorities II: The Multiple Futures of Gender and Sexuality Studies, was held at NYU on April 29, 2011.

Christine Littleton

Christine Littleton joined the UCLA School of Law faculty in 1983 and started teaching in Women’s Studies (now Gender Studies) soon thereafter. As a feminist legal theorist, she published the classic “Reconstructing Sexual Equality” and a number of articles expanding on the relationship between legal theory and feminism, and organized the West Coast Feminist Critical Legal Scholars, which helped enable a flourishing of feminist legal scholarship in the late 1980s. As a lawyer and activist, she helped to found the California Women’s Law Center, and has represented individuals and organizations in cases involving sex and sexual orientation discrimination in employment, affirmative action, racial discrimination, disability rights, sexual harassment, educational equity, and animal welfare. Before coming to UCLA, she received her J.D. from the Harvard Law School and clerked for the Honorable Warren J. Ferguson, Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal.

Under Professor Christine Littleton’s lead, CSW held the 2003-2004 Gender Equity workshop series and summit, administered an intramural grant from the Institute for Labor and Employment, co-sponsored a four-part Sociology of Gender series, and successfully submitted a proposal to the National Science Foundation for Professor Sharon Traweek’s research project on developing digital historical archives at KEK (Japan’s National High Energy Accelerator Organization) and collecting oral histories for the archive.

Miriam R. Silverberg

Miriam Silverberg, a Professor Emeritus of History and former Director of CSW, passed away early in the morning on March 16, 2008. Miriam directed the Center from 2000 to 2003. She was a wonderful colleague and she will be greatly missed.

Miriam was a vibrant, productive, and important scholar. Despite debilitating illness over the last several years, she continued her research and writing and published Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times (University of California Press, 2007), which examines the history of Japanese mass culture during the 1920s and 1930s before the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. On December 7 and 8, 2007, the UCLA Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies held a two-day symposium on “Imperial Japan and Colonial Sensibility: Affect, Object, Embodiment” to celebrate the work of Silverberg, who was its original organizer.

Obituary in LA Times | Memorial Slideshow

Miriam Silverberg received her master’s degree at Georgetown University and her doctorate from the University of Chicago. Her master’s essay dealt with the massacre of Koreans in Tokyo following the 1923 earthquake. She carried her interest in Japanese colonialism in Korea to UCLA, where she encouraged graduate students to study Japanese and Korean modernity together. Her research interests include modern Japanese thought, culture, and social transformation; social and cultural theory; and comparative historiography. Her books include Changing Song: The Marxist Manifestos of Nakano Shigeharu (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), which received the 1990 John King Fairbank Prize in East Asian History. She retired from UCLA in 2005.

While Director, she created the CSW Workshop Project. Under Silverberg’s directorship, CSW sponsored a groundbreaking conference titled Feminism Confronts Disability. She also launched the first Biennial Women’s Community Action Award Dinner (with the UCLA Women’s Studies Program which is now Gender Studies); a conference titled Educating Girls: New Issues in Science and Technology Education; and a talk by Matsui Yayori on the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal.

Sandra Harding

Sandra Harding is a Distinguished Research Professor Emerita from UCLA. She has authored or edited seventeen books and special journal issues on topics in feminist and postcolonial epistemology, philosophy of science, and methodology. She was the coeditor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society from 2000 to 2005. She also helped co-found Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society. She has consulted to the Pan American Health Organization, UNIFEM, the UN. Commission on Science and Technology for Development, and UNESCO. She has held visiting appointments at the University of Costa Rica, the University of Amsterdam, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH), and the Philosophy Department of Michigan State University.

During Sandra Harding’s directorship, CSW continued to develop new programs and events, offering some 60 lectures and conferences each year. Several new student awards were endowed, the first-ever Meet Our Authors: Book Signing and Reception was held, and CSW sponsored numerous lecture series on topics including Feminist Controversies and Gender and Science.

Obituary in LA Times

Kathryn Norberg

Kathryn Norberg is an Associate Professor of History at UCLA. Norberg served as Interim Chair of Women’s Studies (now Gender Studies) from 1990 to 1991, and as co-chair from 1998 to 2000. With Sandra Harding, she wrote the proposal which brought Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society to UCLA. Between 2000 and 2005, she and Harding coedited Signs. Norberg’s teaching and research focuses on women and power in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. Her publications include Rich and Poor in Grenoble (University of California Press, 1984) and Prostitution in France: From Ninon to Manon (forthcoming).

Helen Astin and Julia Wrigley

Helen “Lena” S. Astin, Distinguished Professor Emerita at UCLA and senior scholar at the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI), died on Oct. 27, 2015 in Los Angeles at the age of 83 after a prolonged illness. She is best known for her loving heart and for her research on higher education issues related to women, equity, civic engagement and spirituality.

She received her Ph.D. in Counseling and Social Psychology from the University of Maryland. In 1989, she cofounded the UCLA Center for the Study of Women with fellow faculty members Nancy Henley, Anne Peplau, Kathryn Sklar and Karen Rowe, and served as Acting Director of CSW from 1991–1992. Additionally, Astin authored 14 books, including Higher Education and the Disadvantaged Student (1972), Minorities in American Higher Education (1982), Women of Influence, Women of Vision (1991), and Cultivating the Spirit: How College Can Enhance Students’ Inner Lives (2011).

Obituary in LA Times | In Memoriam

Julia Wrigley a professor in the sociology and urban education programs at The City University of New York’s Graduate Center, and her work focuses on social class and inequality. She received a B.A. in sociology from the University of Michigan and her master’s and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In her first book, Class Politics and Public Schools: Chicago 1900-1950, she analyzes conflicts over the control of Chicago’s schools and how these were shaped by the changing fortunes of the city’s working class movements. Her second book, Other People’s Children, explores how domestic workers and middle-class parents negotiate class differences in children’s care. Additionally, her articles have appeared in varied publications, including the American Journal of Sociology and the American Sociological Review.

Carrie Menkel-Meadow and Leticia Anne Peplau

Carrie Menkel-Meadow (Left) and Leticia Anne Peplau (Right)

Carrie J. Menkel-Meadow is a Distinguished and Chancellor’s Professor of Law at the UC Irvine School of Law and an A.B. Chettle, Jr. Professor of Law, Emerita at the Georgetown University Law Center. She received her A.B. from Barnard College, Columbia University and her J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Her expertise includes alternative dispute resolution (mediation, negotiation), legal ethics, feminist legal issues, procedure, and legal education. Menkel-Meadow was a professor of law at UCLA from 1979 to 1996, also serving as a professor in the Women’s Studies program, Acting Director of the Center for the Study of Women, and Co-Director of UCLA’s Center on Conflict Resolution.

Letitia Anne Peplau is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology, Emerita at UCLA. Her research and teaching interests include social psychology, close relationships, gender issues, and gay and lesbian relationships. Peplau has also served on the editorial board of multiple publications, including Psychology and Sexuality, SIGNS: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and Journal of Social Issues.

Karen Rowe

Karen Rowe is currently a Professor of English, Emerita at UCLA. She joined UCLA faculty soon after receiving her PhD from Indiana University in 1971. Rowe received a UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award in 1982 and served as Chair of the Faculty from 1999 to 2003. Her interests include Colonial American, Women’s Literature, Renaissance, and Seventeenth-Century English Literature.

As founding director, Rowe worked with staff, faculty, and students to develop a range of programs at CSW, including colloquia, graduate student grant support, faculty/curriculum transformation projects, affiliated scholars’ programs, and conferences. Under Rowe’s leadership, CSW received grants and support from the Ford Foundation, California Council for the Humanities, NEH, Gould Foundation, and the AAC Consortium. A landmark volume in the area of curriculum transformation, Women of Color and the Multicultural Curriculum: Transforming the College Classroom (edited by Liza Fiol-Matta and Mariam K. Chamberlain), included several CSW research projects funded by the Ford Foundation. The many events sponsored and cosponsored by CSW in its formative years included a conference titled The Dark Madonna: Women, Culture, and Community Rituals; the Women in Science Colloquium Series; Women: Culture, Conflict, and Consensus, the inaugural conference of the California Council of Women’s Programs; and the Women: Culture and Society public lecture series. CSW also created the first Friends of the Center support group during Rowe’s tenure and participated (along with the Center for Asian American Studies and UC Asia Institute) in the first international exchange with Ewha Woman’s University.