Women’s Forum Update
WGS Welcomes New Affiliated Faculty
Shannon Mihalko (Health and Exercise Science)
The semi-annual meeting of the Women’s Forum was held at the home of Dr. Susan Hutson, Professor of Biochemistry at WFU School of Medicine.
Since its revitalization three years ago, the Women’s Forum, an organization of women faculty and key administrators at Wake Forest University, has been working to: encourage collegiality across all schools of the university; create change in policies and practices at WFU; and promote and sustain a healthy and stimulating working environment in which the contributions and needs of women are fully acknowledged. The semi-annual meeting of the Women’s Forum was held Thursday, November 9, 2006 at the home of Dr. Susan Hutson, Professor of Biochemistry at WFU School of Medicine. More than 60 women faculty and key staff/ administrators from both the Reynolda and Hawthorne campuses gathered for cross-campus collegiality and to foster discussion about recruitment and retention of women and minority faculty members. Dr. Debbie Best, Dean of the College and Professor of Psychology at WFU and Dr. Mary Lou Voytko, Women’s Health Center of Excellence Director and Professor of Neurobiology & Anatomy at WFUSM, highlighted findings from the recent “Demographic Trends Report 2001-2005,” researched and published by the Women’s Forum in summer 2006. This document is available on the Women’s Forum website at http://groups.wfu.edu/womensforum. This document provides distributions of academic administrators, faculty members and students at all six schools of the University by gender, minority status, rank, tenure status and leadership responsibilities and was presented to university leaders in July, including members of the University Strategic Planning Council. Discussion at this meeting, stimulated by the report, generated many exciting ideas about specific future steps the Women’s Forum can take to create and promote a supportive community for all at Wake Forest. If you were unable to attend the event and would like to be involved, please contact Shannon Mihalko (mihalksl@wfu.edu) or Claudine Legault (clegault@wfubmc.edu).
Ashley Graham (’08) became Student Assistant for Women’s and Gender Studies in the fall of 2006. Ashley is majoring in Political Science, with a minor in WGS. She is doing a great job redesigning our website.
Dr. Catherine Harnois is Assistant Professor of Sociology. She graduated from UNCChapel Hill with a dissertation entitled Towards an Undisciplined Study of Difference, Feminism and Identity. Her areas of interest focus on Sociology of Gender, Multiracial Feminist and Queer Theory, and Social Stratification. Her publications include “Different Paths to Different Feminisms? Bridging Multiracial Feminist Theory and Quantitative Sociological Research on Gender,” in Gender and Society (2005) and “Democracy in the World Trade Organization: 1995-1999,” in Carolina Papers in Democracy and Human Rights (2004). She is currently working on a book manuscript, Re-Presenting Feminism’s Past, Present and Future. Among various other awards, in 2000 she received the Gladys Tantaquidgeon Scholarship for understanding and advancing the status of minority women. This fall semester she taught SOC 153: Contemporary Families and SOC 360: Social Inequality. Next spring she will also teach SOC 305: Gender in Society. All of these courses give credit toward the Women’s and Gender Studies minor. Dr. Shannon Mihalko received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign and is an Associate Professor of Health and Exercise Science. She teaches Exercise and Health Psychology and Statistics. Dr. Mihalko’s research incorporates a psycho-social approach to understanding determinants and consequences of physical activity. Her interests include the epidemiology of physicial activity across the lifespan, with a particular emphasis on the development of effective and efficient intervention strategies to enhance functional and psychological independence among older adults. Her work has been published in books and numerous journals such as the Journal of Social Behavior and Personality, The American Journal of Medicine & Sports, The American Journal of Preventive Medicine, the Journal of Aging and Physical Activitiy, among others. At Wake Forest she was awarded the Dunn-Riley Professorship in 2003. She is the newly elected chair of the Women’s Forum’s Executive Committee on the Reynolda campus. This past semester she team taught, together with the WGS director, the first session of WGS 101: Window on Women’s and Gender Studies. Dr. Roberta Morosini is Associate Professor of Italian. She has been working on issues related to women since her Ph.D. dissertation, which was developed into a book (Per difetto rintegrare. Una lettura del Filocolo di Giovanni Boccaccio, Ravenna: Longo, 2004). This work includes a comparison of women in Boccaccio’s oeuvre and in Old French romances. She has recently published a book on Marie de France’s Fables (XII century), a translation from AngloNorman into Italian that includes a study of female characters in Marie de France’s Fables within the tradition of the fable genre. She has contributed to Italian Women and the City, a volume edited by Janet Levarie Smarr and Daria Valentini for Fairleigh Dickinson University Press (2003). Dr. Morosini is currently working on the role that Thisbe plays in Ovid’s myth of the tragic lovers Pyramus and Thisbe in XIV century Italian writers and painters. This fall semester she taught, for Women’s and Gender Studies, ITA 216: Italian Women and the City: A Topography of Memory.
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