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Women's and Gender Issues

Alice Adams

Reproductive Issues/Feminist Literary Theory/

Gay Studies

Adams specializes is reproductive and motherhood issues. She is completing a book called With a Mother's Eye: Mythic Revisions of Sexuality and Maternity. She is also the author of Reproducing the Womb: Images of Childbirth in Science, Feminist Theory and Literature. Her dissertion dealt with the literature of birth and human engineering. Adams is also an expert in feminist literature and culture. She has taught courses on feminist literary theory and in lesbian and gay studies.

Ruthann Godollei

Women in Art

Art Department

Godollei's work focuses on women in art. Her monoprints on domestic violence were featured in the recent Minnesota Artist's Exhibition Program at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts as well as at the Minnesota National Print Biennial and at the Rutgers National Works on/of Paper exhibit in New Jersey. Her work has also been featured at the "Under Pressure" national printmaking show in Arizona and the "Women in the Visual Arts" national show in Connecticut. She was also recently the featured artist for Aspekt, a Slovak feminist art and culture journal published in Bratislava. Godollei teaches printmaking, 2-D design and a course on women in art. She serves as Macalester's dean of fine arts.

Harry Hirsch

Civil Liberties/Gay and Lesbian Politics

Political Science Department

Hirsch specializes in constitutional law and jurisprudence as well as American political thought. He is an expert on civil liberties and gay and lesbian politics. He is currently working on a study of attitudes toward politics and law among members of sexual minority groups in American cities including the Twin Cities. In addition, Hirsch has written about and can discuss the electoral college system, the Supreme Court, the First Amendment and other issues.

Teresita Martinez-Vergne

Latin American History/Latin American and Caribbean Women

History Department

Martinez-Vergne specializes in Latin American history. Her current research focuses on the workings of gender and race on notions of citizenship within the discourse of nationalism. Her new book is Shaping the Discourse on Space, Charity and its Wards in 19th Century San Juan, Puerto Rico. Other publications deal with the transition from slave to wage labor in the Puerto Rican sugar industry and women of color in the Caribbean. Martinez-Vergne is a member of the Association of Caribbean Historians and served as the co-editor of volume 5 of the UNESCO History of the Caribbean, entitled The Contemporary Caribbean.

Karine Moe

Women in the Economy/Family Economics

Economics Department

Moe is currently investigating the role of women in economic development. She teaches a course that explores how gender differences lead to different economic outcomes for women and men within families and the marketplace. She can also discuss economic growth issues as well as labor and demographic economics and the economics of the family.

Emily Rosenberg

Women's History/Women in American Foreign Relations

History Department

Rosenberg is an expert on the history of U.S. foreign relations. Her current research interests include U.S. economic and cultural expansion as well as bringing issues of gender into the field of diplomatic history. She has served on the State Department's Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation, which works on issues surrounding the declassification of documents. She has also been president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Rosenberg is currently on the editorial board of the Journal of American History. In addition, she is writing a book on dollar diplomacy called Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900-1930.

Sonita Sarker

Women's Literature

English Department

Sarker is the director of the college's Women's and Gender Studies Program. She specializes in 20th century British and postcolonial literature with an emphasis on women's writing as well as literary and feminist theory. She has published essays on Bessie Head, Virginia Woolf and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain. She has edited a collection of essays called Marking Times and Territories: Genders in the Globalization of South and Southeast Asia, which includes two of her own essays. In addition, she is currently revising a book on exile as well as an anthology on gender and race.

Jaine Strauss

Eating Disorders/Women and Mental Health

Psychology Department

Strauss is interested in feminist approaches to clinical psychology. She studies gender and mental health with a focus on body image, eating disorders, mood and conceptions of self. Her study on the effect watching diet TV commercials has on dieters was published nationally. Strauss teaches courses on personality, clinical and community psychology and behavior disorders.

Joelle Vitiello

French Women Writers

French Department

Vitiello specializes in contemporary women writing in French. She recently co-edited a book on women writers from the French-speaking Caribbean and is completing a book on the representations of friendship in contemporary literature written by women. She teaches courses in 20th century French literature, Franco-phone studies, as well as cultural trends in contemporary France.

Karen Warren

Ecological Feminism/Environmental Ethics

Philosophy Department

Warren is an expert on women and environmental ethics. She speaks widely on environmental issues, feminism, critical thinking skills and peace studies. She has written and edited numerous books, including Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What it Is and Why it Matters, Ecological Feminist Philosophers, Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature as well as From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology and Bringing Peace Home. Warren was recently the Ecofeminist-Scholar-in-Residence at Murdoch University in Australia. She also attended the United ations 1992 Earth Summit in Brazil and was a guest speaker at a seminar on gender, development and the environment held in conjunction with the summit.