Affiliates Spotlight

Why did you decide to affiliate with Women Studies? Because a lot of my research interests deal with gender issues and I support the kinds of things that Women Studies promotes.

What are the most interesting courses you are teaching are planning to teach? I will be teaching a course on representations of gender in Chinese film in the fall and a similarly themed course on Chinese literature in the spring.

Which research projects are currently claiming your time? I am working on representations of Manchurian woman who was raised in Japan and executed by the Chinese government as a traitor after the war with Japan ended in 1945. She is portrayed in very different ways and used for very different purposes by China, Japan, and the Manchurian people.

 What do you like to do in your spare time? What spare time? Actually, I like to read, go on hikes with my dog, visit with friends, cook, and play tennis or racquetball.

What do you like most about UND? The students are great. I have been able to develop such great relationships with so many of them. And, I like the emphasis placed on teaching.

Why did you decide to affiliate with Women Studies? Women Studies was initiated in the early 1980s as a multidisciplinary, cross-campus program with courses in the traditional disciplines. Looking forward to future years, we chose not to make it a free-standing program that could be casually lopped off in budget-cutting times. Establishing courses in core departments also meant we were integrating women studies within the disciplines themselves. One component of this arrangement was to create the category of “affiliate”, playing on the idea of filaments, strong lines or ties among the many constituencies of a university. That is why affiliation is open to not only tenure track and tenured faculty but also to academic staff, such as librarians, non-teaching researchers, and academic counselors. As one of the founders of the program and its first director, I am pleased to see that this proved to be a strong foundation, sustaining this important program for nearly thirty years now.

What are the most interesting courses you are teaching are planning to teach? English 357, Women Writers and Readers, is a regular part of the English department curriculum each semester and has been for several decades. Now that we have a good complement of women academics in the department, it is highly sought after by knowledgeable faculty. I subtitle my version “The Classic Texts,” approaching it with the knowledge that works by women writers have only recently been included in high school and college curricula, which means that there is a whole history and lineage of women writers yet to be known by other than specialists. Using the two-volume Norton Anthology of Women Writers, we read works beginning with selections from Dame Julian of Norwich’s Book of Showings and move on through to the 21st century. The 400 and 500 level courses that I teach include the study of works by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Aurora Leigh), Virginia Woolf (A Room of One’s Own, To the Lighthouse, Flush), Emily Bronte (Wuthering Heights), Charlotte Bronte (Jane Eyre), Margaret Atwood (Surfacing, The Edible Woman).

Which research projects are currently claiming your time? I just finished a decade and a half’s work with a team of EBB scholars to produce a scholarly edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s complete literary works. It came out this month (March 2010) from London publisher Pickering & Chatto in five volumes. Along with Professor Crystal Alberts in English, we are at present working on an EBB website to present about a dozen substantially revised poems from those volumes, showing the ways these poems were changed through stages of revision (www.und.edu/instruct/sdonaldson). Both of these projects were partially funded by grants from the National Endowment for Humanities.

What do you like to do in your spare time? Visit our cabin on Upper Red Lake in northern Minnesota – we enjoy the birds and other wild creatures, the sometimes wild and sometimes calm lake, the woods, the clean air, the quiet. My husband is a retired UND Computer Sciences faculty member, now a state legislator. The Grand Forks Symphony’s concerts and the ND Museum of Art’s shows are also a highlight. And of course so are our Siberian Husky, Suzi, and our very fluffy cat, George.

What do you like most about UND? As a university it offers a universe of intellectual and artistic activities for students, faculty, and the community. It is however small enough that as a faculty member I get to know my students quite well, and as a result I try to offer them relevant opportunities to grow and learn. The university’s size also means that faculty interact with members of other departments frequently.

Why did you decide to affiliate with Women Studies? I believe that the field of Women’s Studies reflects a balance between scholarship and activism. Overall, I am sincerely committed to the promotion of diversity, the interrogation of power structures, and exploring the interconnections between gender and other systems of hierarchy. Women’s Studies enhances the lives of male and female students by fostering a critical understanding of how gender and sexuality shape our culture’s views on the values and associations of being male or female. Moreover, since feminist theory addresses a wide range of topics beyond gender alone (e.g. race, ethnicity, class, nationalism, and power) such a program helps students understand and respect cultural diversity, as well as assisting the development of the social transformative process. I actively work to support these ideas.

What are the most interesting courses you are teaching or are planning to teach? I am a medievalist by trade, and a gender theorist in practice. Every class I teach, including linguistics courses and popular culture classes, contains at least some element of gender studies in it. However, addressing specific Gender/Women’s Studies courses, I would point to two that I have taught here at UND as epitomizing my interests. The first was Women of the Pre-Modern World, in which we covered women’s writing around the globe produced before 1650 CE. The second was Medieval Women & Religion, with a focus on cloistered women of the high Middle Ages. In that class, we spent a great deal of time examining the interconnections between sexuality and religious devotion. I am looking forward to teaching more classes that combine the pre-modern world with gender/women’s studies in these and other ways. In the past, I have taught courses on gender theory, the history of sexuality, LGBTQIA issues, gender and language, and religion and sexuality, and look forward to offering more of those as well.

Which research projects are currently claiming your time? I am currently finalizing a volume entitled The Lesbian Premodern (Palgrave, 2011), which is co-edited with Diane Watt and Noreen Giffney. Other books in the works include The Wohunge Group & A Talkyng of the Loue of God: Translated from the Middle English (Boydell & Brewer), Carmel in Britain: Carmelite Rules in Medieval Britain (co-edited with Kevin Alban; St. Albert’s Press), and Gender in Medieval Culture (Continuum). Aside from these projects, I am working on a field guide/gazetteer of extant anchorholds in the United Kingdom, and of course have a number of articles, essays, and presentations that are always in the works.

What do you like to do in your spare time? My interests include: reading (science fiction & fantasy, mostly), gourmet cooking, wine collecting, traveling, feminist activism, spending time with friends, pampering my spoiled cat, watching TV, playing video games, and cross stitch.

What do you like most about UND? I love the intellectual freedom to pursue topics I find valuable and exciting. I love that students are interested and engaged, and willing to take risks and challenges, and in general work hard. I appreciate my colleagues for their support of my medieval and gender studies endeavors.