Kathleen A. McHugh
Director, 2005 - present

Since taking over the directorship in August 2005, Kathleen McHugh has built on CSW's mission to develop, promote, and disseminate faculty and student research on gender, sexuality, and women's issues.  She has overseen the updating and redesign of the CSW website, started a publications unit, introduced a plenary session at the annual Thinking Gender conference, and developed a faculty grants program.  To strengthen the connection between faculty research and CSW programming, she has introduced a faculty curators program to involve faculty directly in the selection of speakers for CSW lecture series.

McHugh teaches in the Department of English and in the Cinema and Media Studies program of the Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media at UCLA.  Her most recent book is Jane Campion (University of Illinois Press, 2007), which examines the subversive style of the woman who has become one of the world’s greatest film directors. She is the author of American Domesticity: From How-To Manual to Hollywood Melodrama (Oxford University Press, 1999), the co-editor of South Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre and National Cinema (Wayne State University Press, 2005), and the co-editor of a special issue of SIGNS on "Film Feminisms."  She has published articles on domesticity, feminism, melodrama, the avant-garde, and autobiography in Cultural Studies, Jump Cut, Screen, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Velvet Light Trap. 

Accomplishments: 2007 to 2008

This year, CSW moved into a new dedicated space in 1500 Public Affairs Building, which has grown to contain six offices, a reception area, a public meeting space, seven workspaces for GSRs and work-study students, and a storage room.  From this new space, CSW was able to start several new programs; appoint its first Associate Director, whose task would be to plan a conference and generate research findings or publications from that conference if possible;  host a number of public lectures and workshops;  and continue to support research on gender and sexuality throughout the UCLA community:

• Intersectionalities, a yearlong UCLA workshop program convened UCLA senior and junior faculty and graduate students who are researching transnational feminisms and comparative racial formations.  Throughout the year, they brought  in outside speakers,  read and discussed key texts, and work-shopped six UCLA junior faculty members’ work in progress.  This seminar largely focused on how discussions of comparative racial and national formations can inform transnational feminist theories.
  
  
• The Gender of “Terror” Conference on May 2, 2008, featured a slate of international scholars discussing non-U.S. centered approaches and interdisciplinary scholarship on terrorism. The conference, organized by Kathleen McHugh and Associate Director Purnima Mankekar, internationalized the discussion and foregrounded the role of gender and sexuality in the formation of terror.  The concern was not with demographics (as in discussions of how many men vs. women become terrorists) but related more fundamentally to the interrelated constructions and representations of gendered identities, agency, nationhood, and citizenship.
  The Senior Faculty Feminist Seminar Series continued to feature public lectures by senior UCLA faculty members, including Felicity Nussbaum, Sherry Ortner, and Françoise Lionnet.
  
  
• With the help of a two-year Community Partnership Grant to partner with a community organization, CSW began the Access Mazer Project.  The goal of this project is to inventory, organize, preserve, and digitize several key Los Angeles-themed collections in the West Hollywood-based June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives.  CSW has provided the entirely volunteer-run Mazer Lesbian Archives with research and archival expertise, technical support, preservation supplies, university affiliation, and community outreach.  This two-year project will result in greater access for academics, independent scholars, and Angelenos to singular materials on lesbians and lesbian-feminist organizations to better conceptualize and write women’s and LGBTQ histories in Los Angeles.  These materials will supplement an historical record primarily focused on gay men and give salience to an historical moment when lesbian rights and feminist movements were more closely aligned. 
  
  
• The Faculty Curator Program funded Tránsito(ry) Público | PUBLICo TRANSITorio held in Los Angeles, San Diego, and Tijuana, a traveling conference and public event series.  Associate Professor of Art History, Charlene Villasenor Black and doctoral student Jennifer Sternad co-curated this series of talks and brought the performance artists Regina Jose Galindo from Guatemala and Jenny Jaramillo of Ecuador to present their works.  The events fostered a multidisciplinary and transnational dialogue between students, faculty, artists, activists, and members of the community.  The speaker series addressed such issues as: How can art effect political change?  What is the future of feminism in the face of post-feminist discourse?  What does it mean to be a feminist, an artist, an activist in the context of the Americas?  In addition to lectures, speakers engaged in more intensive exchanges in workshops, conversations, and video screenings associated with the conference.
  
  
• During Winter 2008, CSW worked with Gail Kligman, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for European and Eurasian Studies, and Lara Stemple, Director of Graduate Studies at the UCLA School of Law, to program their project, “Trafficking, Gender, Human Rights, and Health.”  The speaker series was held in conjunction with a new, interdisciplinary upper-division course on the same subject offered through the Schools of Law and Public Health.  Enrolled undergraduate and graduate students attended the lectures and had dinner with the invited speakers.  Several speakers commented on the pleasures of speaking to a diverse, informed audience.  This series enhanced student knowledge and faculty interaction by providing opportunities for frequent and rigorous intellectual exchange.

The Eighteenth Annual Graduate Student Research Conference, Thinking Gender, was co-sponsored with the Center for Feminist Research at the University of Southern California (USC).  This public conference highlights feminist research on women, sexuality, and gender by graduate students across all disciplines.  The 2008 conference was the largest in Thinking Gender’s eighteen-year history with eighty-six participants and over 250 people in attendance.  CSW received 232 applications for the conference—a record number.  For the past three years the conference has become more competitive for applicants and welcomed a larger number of attendees.  As a result, the quality and national renown of the conference has also increased significantly.  In fact, the Thinking Gender conference held on February 1, 2008 replaced the previous year as the most successful and competitive in recent history.   This year, we extended the time for the panels so that the moderators could give substantive feedback to panel presenters.  This feature heightened the academic rigor of the conference, generated more engaged discussion, and was greatly appreciated by conference presenters.

The editorial offices of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies continue to be located at CSW. Three issues were published, inlcuding two special Issues: Transnational Theory, National Politics, and Gender in the Contemporary Middle East/North Africa and Early Twentieth-Century Middle Eastern Feminisms, Nationalisms, and Transnationalisms.

Accomplishments: 2006 to 2007

This year, CSW revived the Senior Faculty Feminist Seminar Series; organized a UCLA/USC Junior Faculty Exchange Program; opened the Faculty Curator Grants to competitive applications; and hosted a set of public lectures by Faculty Development Grant recipients:

• The Senior Faculty Feminist Seminar Series features a public lecture by a senior UCLA faculty member on a current research project related to women, sexuality, or gender.  Sandra Harding, Professor in the School of Education and Information Studies, served as the inaugural speaker in the revived series. Harding presented her project entitled “Science From Below: Feminist and Postcolonial Standpoints.”  Françoise Lionnet, Professor of French & Francophone Studies, and Sharon Traweek, Associate Professor of History, were the respondents.  The ensuing dialogue allowed faculty to learn about the current scholarship of their colleagues and provided another avenue to engage senior faculty in the work of CSW. 

• The UCLA/USC Junior Faculty Exchange Program provides opportunities for untenured junior faculty to present their current scholarship, network with senior faculty mentors, and build intellectual community among faculty at the two universities. As part of CSW's commitment to foster the research of junior faculty, the exchange program encouraged the academic success of junior scholars at UCLA. The following professors at UCLA participated in the exchange: Lucy Burns, Assistant Professor, World Arts and Cultures; Yogita Goyal, Assistant Professor, English; and Mignon R. Moore, Assistant Professor, Sociology. Participating professors from USC included Gabriel Giorgi, Assistant Professor, Comparative Literature and Spanish & Portuguese; Macarena Gómez-Barris, Assistant Professor, Sociology and American Studies & Ethnicity; and Emily Hodgson Anderson, Assistant Professor, English.

• The Faculty Curator Program is a competitive grant for UCLA faculty that provides funding for a maximum of three presentations by outside speakers whose work pertains to the award recipient’s proposed theme. CSW inaugurated the Faculty Curator grants during the academic year 2006-2007 with the selection of Rachel C. Lee, Associate Professor of English, Asian American Studies, and Women’s Studies, to curate a speaker series on “Feminism, Body Theory, and Performance” during Fall 2006.  It brought together scholars whose research focuses on embodiment, how it is performed and represented in various media, and what issues are thereby made visible. Featured speakers for this series included Judith Halberstam, Professor of English and Director of the Center for Feminist Research at USC, and Susan Stewart, Professor of English at Princeton University.

• Lectures by Faculty Development Grant winners included “Defining the 'Ideal' Body: News Reporting on Obesity and Eating Disorders in the United States and France,” Abigail C. Saguy, Assistant Professor in Sociology; “The Hidden Side of Female Desire: What Ovulatory Cycle Research Reveals,” Martie G. Haselton, Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Psychology; and “The Experience of Being a Girl in a Man’s World: How Discouraging Comments and Sexual Harassment Shape Adolescent Girls’ Achievement, Aspirations, and Self-Concept,” Christia Spears Brown, Assistant Professor of Psychology.

The Seventeenth Annual Graduate Student Research Conference, Thinking Gender, was held on February 2, and was once again co-sponsored by the USC Center for Feminist Research. It was a great success, drawing a record number of panels and participants. The plenary session, "Chickens, Wolves, Warriors, and Zoos: Feminist Science Studies Meets Animal Studies and Law," reflected the theme for Winter 2007 programming: gender and science. The Gender and Science conference, held on February 23, 2007, explored the intersections between science and power and how these intersections shape peoples lives.  This public conference presented a group of preeminent scholars who collectively brought a feminist analysis to the study of science. Speakers included Joan Roughgarden, Professor of Biological Sciences and Geophysics at Stanford University; Banu Subramaniam, Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Kavita Philip, Associate Professor in Women’s Studies at UC Irvine; and Londa Schiebinger, Professor of the History of Science at Stanford. Other events related to the gender and science theme included a talk on "Patents, Genes, and Empire: Indigenous Legal Responses to Biopiracy," by Laura Foster, doctoral student in Women's Studies at UCLA. In May, 2007, CSW presented a mini-conference, “Future Directions in Feminist Philosophy of Science.”  Professor Sandra Harding organized the event in an effort to answer the perennial questions: What is feminist about feminist epistemology and philosophy of science?  Where are feminist values at work in feminist philosophy of science?  Three feminist philosophers, Alison Wylie, Helen Longino, and Elizabeth Potter, discussed the relationship among reason, reasons, and contextual values and the epistemic consequences of diversity, or the lack of it, in the range of values and interests represented in the sciences—specifically (but not only) gendered values and interests. 

The Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies published its first set of issues edited from UCLA, including a special issue on Transnational Theory, National Politics, and Gender in the Contemporary Middle East/North Africa.

Accomplishments: 2005 to 2006