Help pick a new WGSS instructor

Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies is conducting a search for a new two-year teaching position. The individual chosen will teach WGSS and LGBTQ courses during the 2017/2018 and 2018/2019 academic years.

The WGSS department is asking students to attend the teaching demonstrations of three candidates.

The search for a new instructor comes after Beth Bartlett’s retirement at the end of 2016. Bartlett joined the WGSS department in its first year in 1980 after teaching political science for 20 years. She officially joined WGSS in 1999.

WGSS was already short an instructor when Bartlett announced her retirement, which stems from budget issues in the College of Liberal Arts.

The new instructor comes as a sort of relief from last fall when CLA announced that it had to reduce its budget by $1 million, which included the discussion of eliminating WGSS altogether.

Students and instructors rallied together to make it known just how important the WGSS program is. This included a silent protest in the administration building in October.

However, Sheryl J. Grana, head of the WGSS department at the time, said in a message in September that WGSS “will be merging with the Department of Sociology-Anthropology next year.”

While changes are occurring in CLA and in the WGSS program, hope remains for WGSS with the hiring of a new instructor.

Each of the three candidates will separately conduct a mock teaching session in front of WGSS students, instructors and alumni, as well as in front of anyone else interested in attending.

Students in WGSS and those interested in taking WGSS courses are encouraged to attend the sessions to help pick the new instructor.

The candidate sessions are as follows:

Katherine Fobear • Monday Jan. 30 • Garden Room

Teaching demonstration: 3 p.m. to 4 p.m.

Reception: 4 p.m. to 5 p.m.

Chloe Diamond-Lenow • Monday Feb. 6 • Garden Room

Teaching demonstration: 2 p.m. to 3 p.m.

Reception: 3 p.m. to 4 p.m.

Stina Soderling • Wednesday Feb. 8 • Cina 224

Teaching demonstration: 2 p.m. to 3 p.m.

Reception: 3 p.m. to 4 p.m.

According to its website, “Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies is the interdisciplinary study of women's roles, experience, expression, and lives nationally and transnationally, as well as the study of the intersectionality of gender with race, class, sexuality, nation, religion, ethnicity, ability, and age. With liberation, justice, and equity issues as central concerns; the department engages in scholarly feminist inquiry both of the knowledge generated by other academic disciplines, and of societal institutions and processes, and explores the possibilities of feminist transformation of these.”