AASU to Host First Conference on Women's Studies: Visions & Perspectives

Savannah, GA–A celebration of women's roles, achievements, and experiences will be the focus of "Women's Studies: Visions & Perspectives," a two-day conference being hosted by Armstrong Atlantic State University from March 22-23. Armstrong Atlantic and Georgia Southern University professors and AASU graduate students will examine what it means to be a woman in the twenty-first century. The conference will be held from noon to 5:30 P.M. on Friday and from 8:45 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. on Saturday. On Friday, Paideia Women's Chorus will perform beginning at 7:30 P.M. in Jenkins Theater. Women's Voices: A Collection of Works by, for, and about Women will be held on Saturday beginning at 7:15 P.M. in Jenkins Theater. The conference and events are free and open to the public.

The conference will feature Susan Leisure, associate director of the Office of International Education for the University System of Georgia. Leisure will deliver the keynote address, Visions and Perspectives on Women's Studies in 2002. More than thirty lectures will be presented on women's studies topics ranging from mathematics to Meryl Streep, and from African-American history to education in Afghanistan (see conference itinerary below).

This two-day conference will look at women "historically, culturally, emotionally, and professionally," said Teresa Winterhalter, associate professor of English at AASU and coordinator of the conference. "From the front lines in Afghanistan to memorable lines by Faulkner, Kesey, and Hurston, conference leaders will take participants on a fascinating journey of exploration and discovery."

Women's Studies: Visions & Perspectives is Armstrong Atlantic's first conference on women's studies and is funded through the 2002 Gignilliat Professorship. The professorship was awarded to Winterhalter in support of her proposal to establish a women's studies certificate program at AASU. Winterhalter began offering Introduction to Women's Studies this semester and is currently developing other core courses to build the program. The Gignilliat Professorship is endowed by the Savannah Electric & Power Company in honor of its past president and retired member of the Georgia Board of Regents, Arthur M. Gignilliat, Jr.

For more information about the conference, contact Teresa Winterhalter at 912.921.5632 or visit www.as.armstrong.edu/women_studies.

Women's Studies: Visions & Perspectives Itinerary

Noon-12:15 P.M.
Registration and pizza
University Hall Atrium

12:20 P.M.
Welcome
Thomas Z. Jones, President, AASU

12:30-1:00 P.M.
Keynote Address
Visions and Perspectives on Women’s Studies in 2002
Susan Leisure, Associate Director of the Office of International Education,
The University System of Georgia

1:15-2:15 P.M.
•New Millennium Surveillance: Advertisements and the Fantasy of the Vulnerable Female
•Magic Meryl: Meryl Streep and Female Acting
•Historical Confines: The Corset in American History

2:30-3:45 P.M.
•Significant Events in the History of Childbirth
•Lesbians and Menopause: The Change of Life
•Eight Women Out: A Case Study of Casualties in Southeast Asia, 1965-1975
•Mathematics and Gender: Resources, Reflections, and Intersections

4:00-5:00 P.M.
•African American Women’s Reading Groups
•Not Just Tea and Crumpets: The Black Women’s Club Movement in Montgomery, Alabama
•The Problematic Nature of Female Education in Afghanistan

5:15-5:45 P.M.
•A Voice from the Past: The Negro Mother Speaks. Reflections on the trials and tribulations of African-American women in American history

5:45-7:15 P.M.
Dinner on your own

7:30 P.M.
Paideia Women’s ChorusJenkins Theater

8:45-9:45 A.M.
•Women’s Political Identities in New York During WWI
•Changing the Guard: Challenging Preconceptions about Women and Corrections
•Barely a Woman, Forever a Feminist

•The Unicorn Tapestries: An Allegory of Courtly Love
•Finding Freedom through Travel: The Summer Excursions of Mary Haskell
•Women and Public Health Professions

10:00-11:15 A.M.
•Anger as a Political Instrument
•Exerpts from The Wars We Inherit: Anger as Salvation
•Anger as Phallic Mayhem in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

11:30 A.M.-12:30 P.M.
•Finding Female Voices in the Medieval Fabliaux
•Female Sexuality in The Sound and the Fury and Their Eyes Were Watching God
•Out of the Garden Gate and into the Wider World: How Gardening Provided Women with an Entry in the Public Domain, 1900-1935

12:30-1:45 P.M.
Lunch on your own

1:45-2:45 P.M.
•Have We Not an Equal Interest with the Men of this Nation?: Patriarchy and the Gendered Contradictions of John Locke
•What Else Can I Do But Write?: Virginia Woolf’s Feminist Ethics of Style in Three Guineas
•The Women of Christodora House: Progressives Creating a ‘Mother World’

3:00-4:00 P.M.
•The Female Subject in Contemporary Peruvian Poetry
•La Historia del Feminismo de la Republica Dominicana/The History of Feminism in the Dominican Republic
•American Women and the Progressive ‘Situation’: The Relationship of Physical to Political Place in Feminist Identity Formation
•Reflections on Becoming a Feminist

4:00-5:00 P.M.
Wine and cheese reception

5:00-7:15 P.M.
Dinner on your own

7:15 P.M.
Women’s Voices: a collection of works by, for, and about women
Jenkins Theater

March 8, 2002