In the wild ride that is 2020, I greet you not from the Oval, but from my home office! First and foremost, I hope this finds you and all of your beloveds healthy and strong. I am happy to let you know that all of us in WGSS have remained healthy and are still chugging forward on our various feminist projects. Teaching, learning and continuing to conduct our various research projects in the pandemic are all challenges unlike any we have ever encountered, but we are persevering and hope for a return to classrooms, libraries, prisons, museums, archives, high schools, streets and the many sites of our feminist work soon!
As you will find in the Newsletter, the truly defining moment of 2020 for all of us has not only been the COVID pandemic, but also the #BlackLivesMatter uprising of summer 2020. As I am sure many of you were also out in the streets fighting for racial justice, we are working to sustain this national reckoning with white supremacy across as many sites as possible. I am happy to report that the administrative leadership of the College of Arts and Sciences has embraced this social movement with a clear commitment to combatting systemic racism in every nook and cranny of the college. Particularly through the leadership of our own Wendy Smooth, who is now the Associate Dean of Diversity and Inclusion for the college, every department has been charged with concretely addressing racism across their curriculum and departmental culture. This is an exciting moment for higher education and the WGSS department is widely hailed as an exemplar and leader in this work, which is unending.
As you will also find in these pages, our graduate and undergraduate students continue to flourish. Our doctoral students continue to garner prestigious fellowships for the vast array of research they are undertaking, and we continue to have an excellent placement record of all our graduate students. At the undergraduate level, we have officially launched the new LGBTQ+ studies minor and it is already enrolling robustly. The new joint minor with the John Glenn School of Public Policy will roll out in the spring of 2021, and we anticipate great interest in that as well.
For the first time in the history of the department, we are thrilled to have a postdoctoral fellow that is funded by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), Dr. Gale Greenlee. With a recent doctorate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Dr. Greenlee specializes literary representations of Black and brown girlhood, especially in Appalachia. She has a strong record of work in community literacy programs and is deeply committed to the broad work of public humanities. While in residency with us for 2020-21, Dr. Greenlee is teaching undergraduate courses and holding workshops with both graduate students and faculty on various aspects of her research and public humanities work.
Faculty research is also flourishing, with several faculty members completing essays, book manuscripts and major grant initiatives this year. The spring of 2020 was particularly exciting for two of our faculty members: Treva Lindsey and Jennifer Suchland. As detailed in the Newsletter, both of these professors received the Mellon-ACLS Scholars & Society Fellowships. There were only 12 of these fellowships awarded across the nation, so it is amazing to have two of them in our own department! I am sure you will enjoy reading about their exciting research projects that directly engage communities in both Columbus and Cincinnati.
Finally, I am very pleased to welcome Lyn Tjon Soei Len as an assistant professor to the department! With multiple degrees in law from the Netherlands, Professor Tjon Soei Len’s research profile fills a critical need in WGSS: feminist legal studies, with research specialization in markets. Moreover, her broad transnational profile, rooted particularly in western Europe, enhances our longstanding strengths in transnational feminism. As a visiting assistant professor for the last two years, she has already developed exciting new courses: “Profiting from Inequality: Feminist Critiques of the Market” and “Breaking the Law: An Introduction to Gender Justice,” which was the highest debuting course in the history of the department. Professor Tjon Soei Len continues to work with the Clara Wichmann Foundation in Amsterdam, where she pursues strategic litigation to improve women’s positions in the Netherlands. I am thrilled to have Professor Tjon Soei Len join our faculty!
I hope you enjoy this sampling of our activities, aspirations and achievements. We love hearing from you (and included the list of recommended readings as a response to one of your requests). Please let us know whenever you are on campus! Most of all, I hope you all enter 2021 with good health, ample strength and sustained calm: The world continues to need all the feminist passion we can conjure!
Professor Shannon Winnubst, Department Chair