News
Feminist print culture and storytelling symposium co-hosted by professor Agatha Beins
12/1/20
A feminist print culture and storytelling symposium co-hosted and co-organized by TWU MWGS professor Agatha Beins, PhD, in collaboration with Beth Currans from Eastern Michigan University, was held Nov. 6, 2020, and attracted participants from across the nation. During "Critical Border Crossings: Stories, Texts and Their Feminist Travels" panelists explored traditional and indigenous stories, mass-market fiction, scholarly work, and ephemera to illuminate the politics and processes of storytelling and publishing.
Philips-Cunningham receives 2020 Reed Fink Award in Southern Labor History
12/1/20
Danielle Phillips-Cunningham, PhD, Associate Professor of Multicultural Women’s and Gender Studies, was recently awarded the 2020 Reed Fink Award in Southern Labor History from Georgia State University.
Phillips-Cunningham will deliver a presentation at GSU on her project, titled “’We Aren’t Aunt Jemima Women’: The History of Domestic Worker Organizing in Atlanta, Georgia.” The Reed Fink Award will also support Phillips-Cunningham’s research of the Dorothy Bolden Collection at GSU’s Southern Labor History Archives.
Bolden established the National Domestic Workers’ Union of America in 1968. She also worked closely with Martin Luther King Jr., US House Representative John Lewis, Atlanta mayor Andrew Young, and US President Jimmy Carter to organize working-class Black women into the largest voting bloc in Georgia’s history. Her legacy lives on through Stacey Abrams’ Fair Fight organization, The National Domestic Workers Alliance, and other organizations that challenge voter suppression today.
Vocal ensembles bring music to unexpected heights
11/30/20
In November, a limited audience of TWU community members were treated to a free TWU Chamber Singers and Concert Choir performance in an unusual location: The third floor of the Oakland Street Parking Garage. The vocal ensembles, led by professor Joni Jensen, DMA, first made use of the open-air space for rehearsals and then decided to transform the spot into a unique, socially-distanced venue for “Untraveled Worlds.”
Johnathan Smilges wins Coalition of Feminist Scholars dissertation award
11/24/20
Assistant professor Johnathan Smilges' dissertation, "Queer Silence: Rhetorics of Resistance," recently won the Presidents Dissertation Award from the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition, the premier organization of feminist rhetoricians. The award is presented biennially to the "doctoral dissertation that makes an outstanding contribution to our understanding of feminist histories, theories, and pedagogies of rhetoric and composition.” One judge wrote the following of Smilges’s project:
“Smilges’s work savvily moves between theory and analysis, offering up important insights in the ways that silences work in queer and trans rhetorics. Their chapter on ex-gays is compassionate, smart, aware of its limitations, and deftly ties together queer theory and disability theory.”
TWU’s first graduate Student Regent finds a voice for herself, others
11/12/20
Now in pursuit of a master’s degree in political science, Dawna-Diamond Tyson holds, arguably, TWU’s highest student role: Student Regent. She is the first graduate student in TWU history to hold that post. While not a voting member, she acts as a voice for students on the Denton, Dallas and Houston campuses to TWU’s Board of Regents and represents TWU at the highest levels within Texas higher education.