Table of Contents
Teaching the
Project
Introduction
|
Biographical ProfilesJudith Musick 
Judith Musick, is the Director of
the Feminist Humanities Project and the Associate Director of the Center
for the Study of Women in Society at the University of Oregon.Dr. Musick spent two years in graduate school at the University of Oregon before completing her doctorate in Sociology at the University of California, San Francisco in 1984. After a career in research administration, Dr. Musick became the proprietor of a garden and gift store - an oasis in the heart of San Francisco’s famed Castro neighborhood. Upon her return to Eugene, she started work at CSWS and became quickly enraptured with the work and creativity of the feminist humanities faculty. One of Dr. Musick’s many passions is in "wiring" the humanities and creating new and vital forms of academic collaboration. She founded and co-directs the accomplished Wired Humanities Project.
Stephanie Wood  Stephanie
Wood is a Research Associate at the Center for the Study of Women in
Society. She holds a doctorate in Latin American history from UCLA, which
she received in 1984. She has been teaching intermittently at the University
of Oregon since 1992, where her most recent course offerings have included
the History of Women in Latin America, Mexico's Women Icons, and Gender
in History. She co-edited Indian Women of Early Mexico (Norman: University
of Oklahoma Press, 1997) with Susan Schroeder and Robert Haskett, and she
has two other books. Her current research project examines gender constructs
in indigenous town founding and caretaking. She became the Coordinator
of the Feminist Humanities Project in 2002 and the Co-Director of the Wired
Humanities Project in 2003. With WHP, she is helping build the Gender
in Early Mesoamerica Database, the Mapas
Project, and the Virtual
Mesoamerican Archive. Write to her to request passwords for accessing
these project.
Regina Psaki 
Regina Psaki, Professor of Romance
Languages at the University of Oregon, is fascinated with the concept of
individual identity in a time regarded as dispossessed of such personal
signatures, the Middle Ages.But why look for traces of subjectivity, similar to our own requirements today, in a period known for its paucity of extremely personal autobiographical narratives, letters and poetry? Why explore how people conceived of individual identity in the Middle Ages where only a fraction of writing was created in the author's mother tongue rather than learned Latin and where most writings and artworks were anonymous? Dr. Psaki's research is more comparative than specialized. This allows her to employ a 20th century state-of-the-art lens to focus on evidence of individual consciousness and creativity in the games medieval authors play with the dominant categories of their culture. For example, when a medieval writer parodies a lofty genre such as the dream vision; takes an audacious theological position; or adorns a chivalric romance with long quotations from courtly songs, he leaves a self-portrait as individual as a signature. Dr. Psaki's passion for Italian and French medieval literature abides in finding these surprising and exuberant expressions of self that is our legacy from those in every age everywhere.
Barbara Altmann 
Barbara Altmann is Associate Professor
of Romance Languages at the University of Oregon. As a graduate Student,
Dr. Altmann was determined to work in the area of French medieval literature
because of her unquenchable interest in the field, which would sustain her
through the travails of a dissertation. One day, she happened upon the New
York Times Book Review featuring a story on the English translation of a
Middle French book, City of Ladies, by Christine de Pizan. How did a woman
of the fifteenth century get published? How much of an anomaly was it to
have a woman author participate in public discourse? How could a woman take
on a topic as controversial as the rehabilitation of women's reputation,
especially in the face of a pervasive medieval misogyny?There are two vital refrains in textual research. The need to read any one author's work against the backdrop of her or his contemporaries is imperative, as is the necessity to consider medieval works in their manuscript presentations in order to understand how they were read in their day. Dr. Altmann's research, though concentrated on Christine de Pizan, has grown to encompass a wide field of authors writing in French at the end of the Middle Ages, an era already engaged in many humanist notions. One of Dr. Altmann's projects has been to illuminate a number of under appreciated texts through a new critical edition of three long debate poems. Her next project involves the poetics of lyric poem collections as an expression of the aesthetics of the age. More broadly, she has pursued questions of subversion and convention, the ways in which authors make creative use of accepted literary forms to introduce contestable materials. In 1997, Dr. Altmann won the Ersted Award, the University of Oregon's annual prize given to its best teacher.
Louise Bishop 
Louise Bishop is Assistant Professor
of World Literature in the Robert D. Clark Honors College at the University
of Oregon. Dr. Bishop began a lifelong engagement with a fourteenth century
English dream vision poem, "Piers Plowman", written in Midland dialect by
William Langland. The poem, depicting the tumult of English society, occupied
a powerful place in its time because of its cranky realism and insistent
call for social justice.Dr. Bishop is interested in late medieval English piety, especially in the role women played as teachers and readers of pious texts. What was life like in 14th century Europe for a particular woman, who was a reader, to negotiate her way in a society forged on the anvil of patriarchal Christianity? How do we recuperate an intellectual and imaginative feminine aesthetic that was fully immersed in the Christian ethos of the late Middle Ages? In 1993, Dr. Bishop was honored with the Ersted Award, the University of Oregon's annual prize given to its best teacher. Her creative pedagogical strategies are designed to explore the seductive similarities and gaping differences between modern and late medieval culture. Such similarities provide ways for students to sympathize with the past while offering them a way to think about their own place in the scheme of things. The differences create an unbridgeable chasm that urges students to focus on their place in the here and now while trying to balance the inherent tensions between the past and present. Dr. Bishop has designed a vital learning environment where students encounter "otherness" and are enabled to develop their ability to handle paradox, which are the hallmarks of an education in the humanities.
Jan Emerson |
Before moving to Oregon, 
Daniel
Gilfillan is currently a consultant with FHP. He began working with us in
June 1998 as a Graduate Teaching Fellow providing primarily website design
for the various initiatives and projects which the Center supports. In 2002
Dan received his Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literatures, with a dissertation
project entitled "From Monstrosity to Liberation: Situating Technology in
Alfred Andersch's Work" which investigates modern attitudes towards technology
and its effect on the modern subject apparent in Andersch's early poetry
and short prose from 1934-1943 and relates them to the author's later role
in radio broadcasting and literary production in the 1950's. The study detects
in the earlier writings a reactionary stance towards technology, a view
of the technical as monstrous and enslaving. Yet, the postwar radio programs
and literary work highlight a more informed notion of technology as an innovative
tool that cuts across social, economic, and political boundaries and dismantles
the economic hierarchy set up in the wartime poetry and prose. The investigation
seeks to demonstrate how Andersch's collaborative work with the broadcasting
medium relates to his philosophical and literary endeavors. In looking to
other periods for models and patterns for integrating technology, the dissertation
provides insight into today's issues surrounding the application of Internet
and computer technology in the Humanities. Dan currently holds a humanities
computing position at Arizona State University.
Currently one of our consultants, Zoe Borovsky formerly taught in the department
of Germanic Literature and Languages at the University of Oregon and now
resides at UCLA. Dr. Borovsky specializes in Medieval Scandinavian Literature
and Gender Theory. She is interested in the notion of sexual difference
as it appears in popular Icelandic sagas. By comparing the fantastic figures
of giants and giantesses, she studies the roles fantasy and popular culture
have in establishing and changing notions of masculinity and femininity.
Her interest in Scandinavia began when she spent a year as a foreign exchange
student in a hauntingly beautiful fjord town in Norway. There, she was perfectly
situated to reflect on the remarkable and complex filter called "culture."