2003-2004 Williams Fund Recipients

Women's and Gender Studies
"Revise and Restructure Women, Difference, and Power" is taught by Judith Raiskin, Lynn Fujiwara, and Elizabeth Reis, Women's and Gender Studies Program. This proposal allows faculty members to redraft and update the program's introductory lecture course for the first time since its inception in the 1970s.

"The class has not been significantly changed since its inception in the early 1970s when the women’s studies courses originated nationwide," Raiskin says. "The field has changed a great deal since then."

In fact, what began at the UO as the Women’s Studies Program in 1976, has changed its name to reflect areas of study that do not solely pertain to women (the Women's and Gender Studies Program). Some of these contemporary issues include the study of transgender, masculinities, religion and sex, migration, citizenship and other global topics.

The specific focus of the Williams funding is enabling the program’s three teachers to expand enrollment of the class to as many as 150 students.

The new model allows the faculty members to teach more than three times as many undergraduates a year, in addition to allowing time for the training and supervision of the GTFs and undergraduate facilitators. In addition, guest lecturers from other similar successful programs across the nation visit the campus.

History & Romance Languages
An interdisciplinary approach to the historical and literary exploration of race in Latin America. "Racial Exchanges: Historical and Literary Constructions of Race in Modern Latin America" is taught by Carlos Aguirre, Department of History, and Jesús Díaz-Caballero, Department of Romance Languages.

Taught in Spanish, this class combines lectures and discussion of the convergence of different racial groups for more than five centuries as a central component in shaping Latin American societies. Bringing together the two disciplines of history and Spanish, the class is presented in historical perspective, along with a look into popular culture and literature, in order to grasp the complexities and subtleties of the experience of race in Latin America.