Courses Regularly Taught

WS 351: Women, Ideas and Society [sample syllabus]
WS 345:20th-Century Literature by Women
WS 452: Marriage and Family - Feminist
Perspective [sample syllabus]

Research Areas

My research combines a feminist analysis of literature and history to focus on several themes:

• patriarchal practices in a situation of apparent privilege: reexamining how a famous and powerful woman, Empress Catherine the Great of Russia, was represented in her own lifetime and how the representations changed after her death
• kinds of discourses surrounding a woman ruler. Did she have to be recast as a man in order to appear functional? How is her female body represented?
  
• the combustibility of sexuality, when it is poured onto the fire of gender and class in an overtly political context, again using the example of Catherine II
• the dimension of celebrity, whereby the fame of the rich and powerful woman feeds into certain tendencies of emerging capitalism and yields a new form of commodification similar to female celebrity of today On a more contemporary and local note, I have also been working on Hawaii’s history as the first state to decriminalize abortion.
  

Representative Publications

Perilous News and Hasty Biography: Representations of Catherine II Immediately after her Seizure of the Throne.(2004) Biography 27, 517-34.

Eighteenth-Century Libertinism in a Time of Change: Representations of Catherine the Great.(2002) Women in German Yearbook 18. 67-88.

Europens Kaiserinn,' Katharina II. und die Zelebrit?t. (2001). L'Homme, Zeitschrift f?r Feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 12. 265-90.

'Lights out! Lights out!' Women and the Enlightenment. Formatting Gender, ed. Marion Gray and Ulrike Gleixner. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006

 

Shout out Girl, Abortion in Hawaii, a website made by Ruth Dawson's students