Women's Studies Colloquium May 1 (F)

Women's Studies Colloquium Series Spring 2009
May 1 (F) 12:30-2:00 Saunders 541

One of Women's Studies faculty members, Dr. Ruth Dawson is retiring at the end of this semester. This special talk by Dr. Dawson is followed by a reception to celebrate her accomplishments and a new start. Please come and join us!


"Framed! A Gendered take on Words and Images"

by Ruth Dawson (Women's Studies, UHM)

Abstract: Using examples that range from Hawaii, modern and ancient, to 18^th-century Germany, this talk explores gendered narratives of looking and being looked at and asks us to think how these acts are represented in a mural we walk past almost daily, in transcripts of abortionist trials, and at other sites where words and images interact.

Ruth Dawson is a professor of Women’s Studies, a position she reached after many years in the non-tenure-track wilderness in which increasing numbers of UHM faculty will probably soon be confined. She earned her Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan, and, as her three thick personnel folders in the Dean’s office attest, has probably been terminated more often from the University of Hawaii than all her Women’s Studies colleagues combined—after all, lecturers get ceremonially terminated every semester! In addition to the varied teaching, which she loves, her research focuses on the rediscovery and reassessment of eighteenth-century German women writers, the analysis of representations of Catherine the Great of Russia and of Catherine as an early woman celebrity, and critiques of the exploration texts that resulted from the Cook voyages in the Pacific.