newsletter fall 2001

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Bettine Birge (East Asian Literatures and Languages) gave a paper at the American Oriental Society, Western Branch, annual meeting held at UCLA entitled, "Constructing Tradition: Foreign Precedents and Confucian Legislation of the Early Ming." She acted as a discussant at a day-long conference on "New Directions in Chinese Gender Studies," sponsored by the Southern California China Colloquium. Look for her long review article on women's property rights in China in the November issue of the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient. See Bettine's report on her CFR-supported travel to China this summer in our travel grant reports.

Carolyn Cartier (Geography) has published a new book, Globalizing South China.

JoAnn M. Farver (Psychology) has received $5,847,519 in funding from the National Science Foundation for a five-year study titled "Enhancing Literacy Outcomes for Young Children."

Claudio Fogu (History) presented his paper "Fascismo-Stile: Normative Style and Fascist Imaginary" at the Fascism/Gender/Sexuality conference at the University of California, Berkeley in October.

Gelya Frank (Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy) has been promoted to full professor.

Charlotte Furth (History) has been awarded the History of Women in Science Prize of the History of Science Society for her book A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China's Medical History 960-1665. The prize is awarded in odd-numbered years to a work that furthers knowledge of the history of women in science, and was presented on November 10, 2001 at the Society's annual convention in Denver, Colorado. In June 2001, Furth gave the keynote address at a workshop on "Chinese Concepts of Privacy" sponsored by the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study in Leiden. Her topic was "Solitude, Silence and Concealment: Boundaries of the Social Body in Ming Dynasty China."

Diane Ghirardo (Architecture) published "The Topography of Prostitution in Renaissance Ferrara" in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians.

Linda Serra Hagedorn (Education Policy and Administration) delivered the keynote address for the Southeastern Association for Community College Research in St. Petersburg, Florida, titled "Transfer Retention of Urban Community College Students: Early Indicators of Transfer." She published "Persistence of female students" (with S. Westebbe, C. Vogt, J. Kealing, and F. Womack) in Encyclopedia of Women in Higher Education. Linda also appeared on KPFK Radio to discuss California budget cuts for higher education. In addition, she reviewed Separate by Degree: Women Students' Experiences in Single-Sex and Coeducational Colleges with A. Perrakis.

Janet Hoskins (Anthropology) edited Fragments from Forests and Libraries, a compilation of important articles by Valerio Valeri. She presented her paper, "Slaves, Brides and Other Gifts: Inequality and Exchange in Indonesia," at the Slavery and Resistance Conference in Avignon, France. She also presented a paper on "Predatory Voyeurs: Tourists and 'Tribal Violence' in Remote Indonesia" at the "Common Grounds" symposium at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, UCLA.

V elina Hasu Houston (Theatre) published Koroko (True Heart) in Political Plays of the 1990s. Her play Mister Los Angeles was published, along with an essay, in Playwriting Master Class. The Lotus of the Sublime Pond, a commissioned play, was produced in a collage entitled Hair Pieces: By Women, About Hair by the Jewish Women's Theatre Project At the Hudson Theatre Guild in Hollywood. Another of her plays, Waiting for Tadashi, will have its world premier in January 2002 at the George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, NJ.

Lanita Jacobs-Huey (Anthropology and American Studies) published "Epistemological Deliberations: Constructing and Contesting Knowledge in Women's Cross-Cultural Hair Testimonies" in EnGendering Rationalities. She organized and will present on the panel "The Natives are Gazing and Talking Back: Language, Identity, and Representation among 'Native' Anthropologists" at the American Anthropological Association's 100th annual meeting. She received a NIH Minority Supplement Grant (2001-2003) for her research focusing on the onset and treatment of Traumatic Brain Injury among African American children and adolescents.

Judith Jackson Fossett (English and American Studies and Ethnicity) published "Negotiating Constituencies: Some Thoughts on Diaspora, and the Past, Present and Future of African-American Studies" (with Kevin Gaines) in Professions: Conversations On The Future of Literary And Cultural Studies. She has developed a new course, AMST 285: Black Popular Culture. She is a Woodrow Wilson Foundation Career Enhancement Fellow for 2001-02.

Heather James (English and Comparative Literature) saw the publication of "Dido's Ear: Tragedy and the Politics of Response" in Shakespeare Quarterly. She delivered her paper "Intimate Jokes in Heptameron 17: The Mystery of Francois ler" in a special session on Marguerite de Navarre at the Renaissance Conference of Southern California at the Huntington Library in June.

Dorrine Kondo (Anthropology and American Studies and Ethnicity) published "(De)colonizing the Academy?" in ORIENTATIONS: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora. She organized the panel "Women of Color (Re)visioning Race" at the American Anthropological Association Meeting in Washington, DC. She has ended her year of sabbatical at the Getty Research Institute. The first act of her new play-in-progress "SEAMLESS" had a staged reading at the Moving Arts Theatre.

Philippa Levine's (History) article, "Public Health, Venereal Disease and Colonial Medicine in the Later Nineteenth Century," appeared in Sex, Sin and Suffering: Venereal Disease and European Society Since 1870. She gave a talk titled "Governing Sexuality and Race in Nineteenth-Century Lock Hospitals" at the University of Toronto's Department of History/Centre of Criminology. This summer she delivered "Breaking Silences: Women, Sex, and Contagious Diseases Legislation" at Locating the Victorians. She also presented "Transnational Perspectives on Imperial Rule: Age of Consent Lesgislation and the Diversity of Colonial Rule in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Britain" at the North American Conference on British Studies.

Susan McCabe (English) published "Delight in Dislocation: Gertrude Stein, Man Ray and Chaplin" in Fall 2001 Modernism/Modernity and "Alice Notley's Experimental Epic" in "'We Who Love to be Astonished': Experimental Women's Writing and Performance Poetics," ed. Laura Hinton and Cynthia Hogue.

Tara McPherson (Cinema-Television and Gender Studies) recently received a $25,000 grant from the Sprint Foundation for a technology outreach program aimed at bringing new media technologies to at-risk youth. The program, Teen Tech, is part of the Race in Digital Space Initiative, a multi-year effort exploring the digital divide as well as innovative technology use in communities of color.

Michael Messner (Sociology and Gender Studies) saw his 1989 article, "Masculinities and Athletic Careers," translated into Russian and reprinted in the Anthology of Feminist Classics in Belarus.

Richard Meyer's (Art History) first book, Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art has been published by Oxford University Press. The book considers the censorship of work by gay artists, from the Navy's confiscation of a painting of sailors on shore leave in 1934 to the recent conflicts over homoerotic art and federal funding. Several of his articles have appeared recently: "Mapplethorpe's Living Room: Photography and the Furnishing of Desire," in Art History; "'Have You Heard the One about the Lesbian Who Goes to the Supreme Court?': Holly Hughes and the Case Against Censorship," in Theatre Journal; "Nature Revers'd: Satire and Homosexual Difference in Hogarth's London," in The Other Hogarth: Aesthetics of Difference; and "Teaching Feminism: A Questionnaire" (with Christina Kiaer), in Documents. In 2000, Meyer received the first annual Passing-the-Torch award from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) at the City University of New York in recognition of his work in the field.

Amy Richlin (Classics) traveled to Lithuania to find her grandfather's village. She was invited to lecture at the Women's Studies Program at Vilnius University. She writes: "I spoke on Thrid Wave feminism in the context of recent developments in Eastern Europe, and managed to [upset] the former head of Women's Studies, who was in the audience (I'm told the interpreter actually toned down her remarks.) It made the papers -- luckily I can't read Lithuanian. I loved Lithuania and would go back in a heartbeat." Amy wrote the Latin curse that Martin Sheen delivered in the season finale of West Wing, which was the subject of learned debate on NPR.

Maria Elena Ruiz (Nursing) is teaching Transcultural Health Care (N420), a nursing course that emphasizes diversity in health and illness and challenges students to explore the intersection of race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, the sociopolitical environment, gender, age, and today's medical industrial complex in health care. She has also redesigned Medical Spanish for Physician Assistant Students (PCPA506), following the format she developed for a project called "Espanol Saludable" (Heathy Spanish). The emphasis is on developing cultural competency, learning bits of Spanish while demonstrating knowledge, respect, tolerance, and understanding of "familismo." She an invited participant in the international research seminar on international migration and U.S.-Mexico border issues. The seminars are a joint project of El Colegio de Mexico (COLMEX), El Colegio de la Frontera Norte (COLEF), Sociedad Mexicana de Demografia (SOMEDE), and various governmental agencies throughout the U.S. and Mexico.

Judith Stacey (Sociology and Gender Studies) published "Family Values Forever" in The Nation (July 9, 2001). She will deliver the plenary address "The Perils and Paradoxes of Public Sociology in Postmodern Society: Marital Suitors Court Social Science Spin-sters" at the Australian Sociological Association meetings in Sydney in December. She has been interviewed about gay parenting research in scores of media ventures, including appearances on "Life and Times in LA," KCET; "The O'Reilley Factor," Fox-TV; Channel 4-LA News; Japanese Public TV; NPR; KPFK, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times; Australian National Radio; and the BBC. Stacey also served as expert witness and with Prof. Tim Biblarz coauthored an affidavit on same-sex parenting research for a same-sex marriage class action case in Ontario.

Nomi Stolzenberg (Law), with Hilary Schor, is serving as codirector of the USC Center for Law, History and Culture. A joint endeavor of the Law School and the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, CLHC is devoted to nurturing the interdisciplinary study of law, from the perspective of a variety of disciplines in the humanities. In September she participated in a conference on "Community" held in connection with the preparation of the third volume of The Jewish Political Tradition, edited by Michael Walzer, Menachem Lorberbaum and Noam Zohar. Her commentary on Kaadan, an Israeli Supreme Court case dealing with ethnic restrictions on land, will appear in the second volume of the series. She also published an article on "The Culture of Property" in Daedalus, which was devoted generally to the topic of "The End of Tolerance: Engaging Cultural Differences." A roundtable discussion on religion and politics, in which she participated along with Michael Sandel, Stanley Fish, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Stephen Carter, was published in Tikkun. She is currently preparing a paper as part of a series on "Law and the Sacred," sponsored by Amherst College.

Nelly Stromquist (Rossier School of Education) has been appointed by the National Academy of Sciences to serve in a two-year-long panel on "Transitions to Adulthood in Developing Countries." She has also been invited to give a keynote speech at a conference in Stockholm, Sweden, on "Education and Poverty Reduction" on October 18th, organized by Uppsala University under the auspices of the Swedish Agency for Development Assistance. Her most recent articles are: (with Joel Samoff) "Managing Knowledge and Storing Wisdom? New Forms of Foreign Aid?" in Development and Change and "Gender Studies: A Global Perspective of their Evolution and Challenges to Comparative Higher Education," in Higher Education.

Ann Tickner (International Relations) saw the publication of her book Gendering World Politics: Issues and Approaches in the Post-Cold War Era by Columbia University Press.

Walter Williams (Anthropology and Gender Studies) was interviewed by PBS television at the recent grand opening of ONE Institute & Archives. He spoke about his work as curator for the new museum which opened at ONE Institute, as part of a special report on "In the Life." Williams also presented expert witness testimony for another case before the U.S. Immigration Court, which resulted in the granting of political asylum in the United States for a Chinese man who had experienced persecution in China on the basis of sexual orientation. In every court case where he has provided testimony, the judge has granted asylum to the immigrant.