Faculty Fellows
Spring 2024
Mara Brecht, Ph.D.
Theology Department
Mara Brecht is an associate professor in the Department of Theology, where she also serves as the Assistant Department Chair. Prior to coming to Loyola University Chicago, Mara held faculty appointments at the University of St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto (Canada) and St. Norbert College (Wisconsin). Mara earned a doctorate in systematic theology from Fordham University, a master’s of theological studies from Harvard Divinity School, and a bachelor’s of arts from Oberlin College. Mara’s research interests are in Christian (especially Catholic) faith formation in contexts of diversity, interreligious dialogue, teaching and learning, and paths of renewal for the Roman Catholic Church. Her Gannon Center project will explore the relationship between spiritual formation and educational leadership. Beginning with a close study of Mundelein College’s Sisters of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mara will investigate how women’s religious congregations have lived out their distinctive charisms at Catholic colleges and universities, and ask how women religious have and continue to pass on their spiritual and educational gifts to new generations of lay leaders.
Marquitta Dorsey, Ph.D.
School of Social Work
Marquitta Dorsey is an Assistant Professor at Loyola University Chicago, School of Social Work. Her research focuses on contextual factors related to health and sexual health-based decision-making among Black adolescent and young adult females who live in and navigate urban communities. The fellowship through the Gannon Center for Women and Leadership will support efficacy testing of the newly developed EMPOWER curriculum for young adult, Black females aging out of the foster care system. Each year, nearly 20,000 youth age out of the system, with many of whom utilize extended care options that usually provide financial support and resources for young people up to age 21. Those who age out of foster care at age 21 without permanency (i.e., formally, or informally adopted into a family), compared to those who age out of care into permanency, are at a greater risk for experiencing housing instability and a lack of family connections (Juvenile Law Center, 2023). The 8-step ADAPT-ITT process (Wingood, 2008) will be used to test the efficacy of the curriculum, specifically, the EMPOWER curriculum’s ability to deliver social capital investments through 12 weeks of empowerment content, coupled with individual therapy sessions. Using theoretical concepts of empowerment, the collaborative-individual context model (CICM), and virtual reality (VR) modalities, along with support from community mental health partnerships, the EMPOWER project will present opportunities for mentorship, a supportive network of resources, and promote the value of individual and group mental health care among young Black females exiting the child welfare system.
Spring 2023
Elizabeth Fraterrigo, Ph.D.
History Department
Elizabeth Fraterrigo is Associate Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago. Her research focuses broadly on the intersection of gender, feminism, and American culture. She is currently at work on a book, The Battle for the Airwaves: Feminism, Media Activism, and American Culture. That project explores efforts from the 1960s through the 1980s by activists in the National Organization for Women and other groups to create a feminist media environment, which they believed would facilitate women’s empowerment and social change. She will spend her time as a Faculty Fellow writing and researching collections in local archives, including the Gannon Center’s Women and Leadership Archives.
Paula Skye Tallman, Ph.D.
Anthropology Department
Dr. Paula Skye Tallman is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Loyola University Chicago (LUC). Her research integrates anthropology and global health to examine how environmental factors are linked to human biology, health, and well-being among marginalized populations in South America and Southeast Asia. As a Faculty Fellow, Dr. Tallman will launch the “Discovery Leadership Initiative”, which will provide individualized leadership coaching for a small cohort of LUC graduate students through the Gannon Center. In this program, students will gain a clearer vision of who they are, where they are going professionally, and how they can lead change for social and environmental justice – aligning with LUC’s mission to Prepare People to Lead Extraordinary Lives. Dr. Tallman will also work with LUC students to write an academic paper on “Women Leaders in Anthropology and Public Health”, which will highlight women in the past, and the present, who have made a global impact on the health of vulnerable communities. This paper will be a timely contribution that will demonstrate how “social justice is the foundation of public health” (Krieger, 1998; 1603) and that young women, particularly those at LUC, are ready to lead this movement.
Spring 2022
Denise Davidson, Ph.D.
Psychology Department
As a faculty member in the Psychology department, my research focuses on a range of issues affected by autism spectrum condition (ASC), including but not limited to, socio-emotional adjustment, language development and in autistic adults, promoting excellence in college. The Gannon Center Faculty Fellowship will allow my undergraduate and graduate students and I to focus on two empirical research studies, one examining how various factors (e.g., executive dysfunction, camouflaging, anxiety) affect female college students with ASC (with and without a formal diagnosis) and the other seeking feedback from female students with ASC on needed support services and the development of a faculty-student mentorship program. I believe that a focus on female college students with ASC is an important one because recent research has challenged the view that ASC is a predominately male disorder. Although the rate of occurrence is higher in males than females (Jacquemont et al., 2014), socio-cultural factors may play a role in the under-diagnosis of women. For example, females with ASC show a greater interest in socialization, fewer stereotypical and repetitive behaviors, and a manifestation of restricted interests that are more consistent with social and gender norms than males (Baldwin & Costley, 2016). Females with ASC also show greater levels of comorbid psychopathology (anxiety, sleep and eating disturbances), which are exacerbated because females may be better at camouflaging their ASC symptoms than males. In sum, a female autism phenotype may exist that current diagnostic tools do not capture. Although intellectually capable, autistic college women often do not succeed in school, in part because of underdiagnosis and also because of misunderstandings about the expression of autism in females. Through the Gannon Center Faculty Fellowship program, a university-wide approach will be taken, including seeking out students in STEM disciplines. This project will enable the university to assist our female students with ASC in reaching their full potential as university students and future leaders.
If you’d like to connect with me, or would like more information about my research, please check out my website: https://davidsonautismlab.weebly.com
Tanya Stabler Miller, Ph.D.
History Department
Tanya Stabler Miller is Associate Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago. She is the author of The Beguines of Medieval Paris: Gender, Patronage, and Spiritual Authority (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) and several book chapters and articles on medieval lay religion, gender, and urban culture. Her project explores the pastoral origins of the college of the Sorbonne and the important role lay religious women played in the Sorbonne’s original mission, thereby offering a history of the medieval university that incorporates women and gender while making an important contribution to a growing literature on the history of healthcare. The central contention of this book is that the early Sorbonne was part of a broader pastoral reform program—spearheaded by university scholars and supported by the French monarchy—that tapped into currents of religious enthusiasm and caritative mission associated with women’s communities, particularly lay religious women known as beguines. Beguines were laywomen who chose to pursue lives of chastity, prayer, and service (particularly hospital work) in the world rather than in a convent (the conventional and papally approved context for female religious devotion). While perhaps a familiar mission for modern Catholics, the beguines were a new phenomenon in the thirteenth century when canon law did not permit women to pursue religious vocations in the world. The beguines’ role in caregiving, which was considered gender appropriate and very much in demand in the growing cities of thirteenth-century France, offered beguines a degree of local support for their communities. Indeed, because the beguines’ healthcare services were valued, local rulers and bishops moved to offer ad hoc legal protections, sponsoring hospitals, leprosaria, and other charitable institutions to which beguines quickly attached themselves. The beguines’ “in-between” status as neither wholly religious (in canonical terms) nor lay made them particularly suited for healthcare work just as their simple (rather than solemn) vows of chastity allowed these women to be in close contact with their patients. The founder of the Sorbonne, Robert of Sorbon, through his connections with powerful bishops, university scholars, and the French King Louis IX, forged close connections between beguine communities and the priests who would go on to direct the women’s hospital work, demonstrating the ways in which the medieval Sorbonne, at the time of its foundation, was concerned with care of both body and soul. By examining medieval understandings of women, gender, labor, and caritative work, this project will consider where women’s labor fit into the medieval economy of salvation while also suggesting some of the ways in which this association shaped gender expectations and roles for women in the modern healthcare industry.
Spring 2021
Aurora Chang, Ph.D.
School of Education
Once an undocumented immigrant from Guatemala and raised in Richmond, California in a family of eight, Dra. (Doctora) Aurora Chang is now an associate professor and program chair in International Higher Education at Loyola University’s School of Education, where she teaches coursework on multicultural education, social justice, undocumented students, critical social theory, Chicana Feminism, and curriculum in higher education. Chang’s research focuses on the intersection of education, identity and agency within traditionally marginalized communities. Specifically, she focuses on the following research strands: (1) How do students and educators from marginalized groups utilize agency to navigate oppressive educational settings? (2) How do their intersectional identities inform, impact and shape their educational experiences? (3) How do their positionalities impact their ways of knowing? Within these research strands, she is interested in the counter-narratives of undocumented students, Latina students, Faculty Women of Color in the Academy, Multiracial Students, and Teacher Educators as well as Curriculum and Pedagogy in Higher Education.
Meghan Condon, Ph.D.
Political Science Department
Meghan Condon is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Loyola University Chicago. She is the recipient of the American Political Science Association (APSA) 2013 Best Experimental Dissertation Award and was named the 2017 APSA Distinguished Junior Scholar in Political Psychology. Her research examines the relationship between inequality and political attitude formation, political engagement, and the effectiveness of policies designed to reduce inequality among children and youth. Her first book The Economic Other: Inequality in the American Political Imagination was published in 2020 with The University of Chicago Press. Her research has also appeared in journals including the Journal of Politics, Political Behavior, Political Psychology, and Policy Studies Journal. Professor Condon is a former middle school and high school teacher and has now taught students in every grade from 7th to graduate school. She currently teaches courses in American politics and public policy, environmental policy, and inequality and American democracy and is an active faculty participant with the Loyola Senn High School Partnership.
Spring 2020
Jenna Drenten, Ph.D.
Quinlan School of Business
Dr. Jenna Drenten is assistant professor of marketing in the Quinlan School of Business, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in marketing, integrated marketing communications, and digital consumer culture. Jenna’s research aims to understand identity development in consumer culture. Her current research explores how digital technologies and social media platforms (e.g., TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Twitter) present new opportunities for consumers to express their identities and navigate life transitions. Her research examines multiple facets of digital culture and identity, from individual consumer behavior to systemic macro-level structures.
Julia Pryce, Ph.D.
School of Social Work
Dr. Pryce’s research focuses on school-based interventions, the role of mentors in the lives of system-involved youth, and program development. Her additional areas of scholarship include the development and study of mentoring programs internationally and the role of social justice in social work curricula. Dr. Pryce teaches in the HBSE and research sequences in the undergraduate, Masters, and doctoral programs.
Spring 2019
Amanda Bryan, Ph.D.
Political Science Department
Amanda Bryan is an Assistant Professor in the Political Science department at Loyola University Chicago. Dr. Bryan’s research focuses on the influence of external constraints on judicial decision-making. Past research has included examining how public opinion affects the Court’s policy outputs, justices’ decision to grant certiorari, and their treatment of past Court precedent. More recently she has been focused on the gender gap in the federal judiciary and exploring how gendered beliefs on what makes a good judge can influence the success of female jurists.
Spring 2019
Amy Krings, Ph.D.
School of Social Work
Amy Krings is an Assistant Professor of Social Work at Loyola University Chicago. The purpose of her research agenda is to develop knowledge relating to the advancement of social justice through the leadership development and civic participation of marginalized groups. This agenda has manifested in two complementary lines of research. The first line focuses upon leadership development among young people, particularly their growth as social change agents. The second line is focused on the study of community-based organizations and their strategic campaigns to advance environmental or educational justice. Her goal is to disseminate knowledge that has the potential to inform policies that reduce systemic inequalities. Prior to entering her doctoral program, Dr. Krings worked for six years as a community organizer, grant-writer, and interim Executive Director at a Cincinnati non-profit where her responsibilities included the management of a community-based campaign to reduce street-level gun violence. She earned her PhD in the Social Work and Political Science Joint Doctoral Program at the University of Michigan.
Spring 2018
Noni Gaylord-Harden, Ph.D.
Psychology Department
Noni Gaylord-Harden is an Associate Professor and Director of the Parents and Children Coping Together (PACCT) Research Lab in the Department of Psychology at Loyola University Chicago. Dr. Gaylord-Harden’s research interests focus on stress, coping, and psychosocial functioning in African American youth and families in high-risk contexts. Her recent work examines the impact of stressful and traumatic life experiences, such as community violence exposure, on the psychosocial functioning of youth of color, the coping strategies that youth use to manage violence exposure, and the family factors that encourage youth to use more adaptive coping strategies. She has received funding from The Department of Justice, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the American Psychological Association, and the Institute of Education Sciences for her research efforts.
Spring 2018
Patricia Sheean, Ph.D.
Marcella Niehoff School of Nursing
Project: Body composition, lifestyle factors and quality of life among women with metastatic breast cancer (BC2 study)
Metastatic breast cancer is cancer that has spread beyond the breast to other parts of the body. This stage of breast cancer is considered incurable; however, it is treatable. Due to treatment advances, women with metastatic breast cancer are living longer than ever before. Therefore, the purpose of this exploratory study is to gain a better understanding of the symptoms and quality of life experiences in 10-15 women undergoing treatment for hormone negative metastatic breast cancer. A further purpose of this study is to measure body composition (i.e., muscle) using current physical measures (e.g., height, weight, waist and hip circumference, etc.) and information from computed tomography (CT) tests routinely ordered during treatment. Several studies in persons with other types of cancer have shown important links between muscle quantity and symptoms. We would like to explore this relationship further and use these data to design a follow up intervention in this vulnerable population.
Spring 2017
Susan Ross, Ph.D.
Theology Department
Project: Women, Sacramentality and Justice
An interdisciplinary approach to theological aesthetics and ethics sees the good as more than “doing the right thing” but also providing the rationale, context and means for a better and more beautiful world.
Spring 2017
Rebecca Silton, Ph.D.
Psychology Department
Project: Neural Correlates of Affectivity in Women with Postpartum Depression
A multidisciplinary research project, including research training and mentoring for students, to inform prevention and treatment so as to improve the lives of at-risk women and children.
Spring 2016
Twyla T. Blackmond Larnell, Ph.D.
Political Science
Project: Genter and Politics: The Underrepresentation of Women (of Color) in America's Mayoral Cities
Women compose approximately half of the American population. Despite the increase in electoral gains at the local level, women, especially women of color, remain underrepresented in municipal government, particularly the mayor’s office. The number of females leading American cities does not reflect the demographics of society and has significant implications for democracy and the representation of women in policy-making. The literature on women in politics has either focused primarily on national and state politics or relied on smaller datasets while ignoring the complicated relationship between gender and race. The paucity of research surrounding the study of the gender gap in political representation is disappointing. The purpose of my research project is to address the theoretical and methodological limitations in the literature by examining women (of color) mayors and the 1) factors contributing to their presence; 2) prestige of the mayoral offices held; and 3) political careers before and after their mayoral tenure. Three separate studies will be conducted utilizing a rich dataset that includes all American cities larger than 10,000 in 2011 as well as several variables collected from the U.S. Census, city websites, biographical statements and internet searches of local media. Unlike existing studies, this research 1) examines a much larger dataset that is representative of various city types and 2) considers the integrated effects of gender and race on women’s experiences as mayor. The Gannon Center Faculty Fellowship will support the pre-tenure research of a woman of color interested in developing a new line of scholarship that unravels the complexity of women in local politics, specifically in a position of leadership. The research has the potential to provide groundbreaking findings and compel scholars to delve deeper into this representational dilemma.
Spring 2016
Anne Reilly, Ph.D.
Quinlan School of Business - Management
Project: Women Leaders as Change Agents for Sustainability
Stewardship of the earth’s natural and human resources is part of the Jesuit tradition. Women are a critical force in support of proper environmental management, better quality of life, and greater social equity in the transition towards a sustainable world view. Despite women’s ongoing contributions as sustainability change agents, empirical research linking gender, leadership and sustainability is limited.
This study examines the gender composition of executive leadership and its sustainability impact in firms ranked highly by Newsweek’s “Green Rankings.” With global companies moving toward sustainability in their operations, women leaders may serve as catalysts in shaping this shift. The study combines my long-standing research interest in gender and careers with my more recent focus on organizational change and sustainability. While the proportion of women corporate leaders remains small, preliminary findings indicate that they may be disproportionately effective as sustainability change agents.
Data collection comprises both quantitative and qualitative methods in analyzing annual reports, corporate social responsibility reports, GRI documents, and statistics generated by UN agencies and the World Bank. Research questions include:
- Are firms ranked high in sustainability performance more likely to have female CEOs, a higher proportion of women in top management, and/or more women board members?
- Are women more likely than men to serve as corporate sustainability officers?
- How do women executives contribute to their companies’ sustainability initiatives?
- What characteristics are shared by women leaders in firms with a strong sustainability focus?
The research finds will be disseminated through publication and presentations on campus and at appropriate external conferences. In addition, the study results should inform coursework relating to sustainability, gender and diversity, and values-based leadership.
http://www.luc.edu/quinlan/stories/archive/women-may-be-more-effective-sustainability-leaders.shtml
Spring 2015
Dina Berger, Ph.D.
History Department
Project: Before the Good Neighbor: Civic Activism and the Origins of Inter-American Unity, 1907-1959
For nearly a century, women members of the Pan American Round Tables (PART) from Texas and Latin American have been leaders in the quest to bring about peace and prosperity in the hemisphere through education and public service. The group’s mission was rooted in “practical Pan Americanism,” a concept coined by John Barrett, director of the Pan American Union from 1907-1919, which made the aspiration of inter-American unity relevant and tangible for Americans. While progressive-era men in government and industry negotiated the economic and political terms of the emerging Pan American family, ordinary citizens could achieve practical results by promoting goodwill toward Latin America and its people. For internationalist-minded Texas women this meant learning Spanish, giving scholarships to Latin American women at Texas universities, organizing Pan American libraries, and hosting visiting diplomats at monthly luncheons. Acts like these became the model for civic activism within a more urgent Pan American movement signaled by the Good Neighbor policy and WWII. Before the Good Neighbor uncovers the origins of Pan Americanism, all too often attributed to a few exceptional men like Elihu Root and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and locates its enactment in non-governmental institutions like the Pan American Union and in women’s and men’s civic clubs like PART. By reframing our understanding of the Good Neighbor, this book decenters traditional top-down studies of hemispheric relations to document the seminal role played by non-elite actors, especially women, in shaping the course of twentieth-century U.S. foreign policy in Latin America based on values such as democracy (peace) and capitalism (prosperity) through a rhetoric of cooperation that ultimately solidified U.S. hegemony in the region.
Spring 2015
Sandi Tenfelde, Ph.D.
School of Nursing
Project: Yoga for Women to Self-Manage Urinary Incontinence Symptoms
Scope of the Problem: Women with urge urinary incontinence (UUI) have considerable symptom burden: the fear and anxiety of living with UUI and risk of potential embarrassment, results in psychological morbidity, impaired relationships, social isolation, and poor quality of life. Pharmacologic treatments for UUI have multiple adverse effects with decreasing efficacy in the long term, reducing the willingness of women to treat their symptoms with medications. Furthermore, new evidence indicates UUI symptoms are associated with elevated urinary proinflammatory cytokines, resulting in an imbalance of parasympathetic and sensory innervations of the bladder. Yoga, a popular mind-body therapy, may serve to benefit women with UUI by reducing UI symptom distress, perception of severity and impact on daily living. Moreover, increasing research demonstrates that the practice of yoga results in positive psycho-physiologic effects, including reduced inflammation.
Methods: This randomized controlled pilot study will use a psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) framework to advance understanding of symptom distress and to evaluate a self-care approach (yoga) for women to manage biobehavioral symptoms associated with UUI. Women with UUI symptoms (22/group) will randomized to either an 8 week, twice weekly yoga program or a control group. The specific aims are to:
(1) Determine the extent to which a yoga program reduces UUI symptoms (distress, severity, and impact on daily living).
(2) Evaluate associations among psychological stress, proinflammatory cytokines, sympatho-vagal balance and UUI symptoms in women completing a yoga program compared to control women.
Relevance: The evidence generated from this patient-oriented pilot study will provide preliminary data to support the submission of a larger grant with a sample size that has sufficient power. The goal of this research is to challenge current UUI treatment paradigms and to equip women with UUI symptoms with an acceptable and cost-effective approach to self-manage their symptoms; empowering them to live active, normal lives.
Spring 2014
Dawn A. Harris, Ph.D.
Management, Quinlan School of Business
Project: Women Moving into Corporate Leadership Positions at Best Practice Companies
This research project builds on a previous article that received widespread media attention and was published in the Academy of Management Perspectives journal with my co-authors Constance Helfat and Paul Wolfson (Dartmouth College). Based on this data set of nearly 10,000 individuals, which yielded a comprehensive census of top executives in U.S. Fortune 1000 firms in 2000, a new analysis will be conducted to identify companies that have successfully moved women into the very top executive ranks and the approaches used by these best practice companies. The data analysis will develop results-oriented criteria for evaluating company success in promoting women to top leadership positions.
Relatively little work has focused on how a woman's choices can affect her career success. The research results will provide implications and recommendations for women to choose companies and industries that will promote women at different stages of their career (i.e., early in their careers, when switching companies, and when re-entering the corporate workforce). In addition, lessons from the best practice companies will assist companies with hiring, promoting, and retaining promising women in leadership positions.
Spring 2014
Michelle Nickerson, Ph.D.
History Department
Project: The Camden 28: Fratres Sororesque in Pace
The Camden 28 was a community of peace activists--men and women--who joined similar units around the country to disrupt conscription operations to protest U.S. sponsored aggression in Vietnam. The group's weeks-long intricately planned action to invade the Federal Building and burn draft cards might have succeeded had the F.B.I. not managed to recruit a secret informant to infiltrate the conspiracy. Though caught red-handed, the Camden 28 escaped conviction in what Supreme Court Justice William Brennan describes as one of the "great trials of the twentieth century." The defendants represented themselves and won a full jury acquittal.
The Camden 28 worked in unison with other "Catholic Left" groups to deploy creative non-violence in America's eroding industrial sector. I am interested in how raiders drew from church doctrine, ethnic working-class identity, and the Catholic worker movement to develop a gritty rustbelt masculinity that shaped their critiques of the war and corporate capitalism. Though fully reliant on its female and male participants alike, Catholic Resistance nevertheless acquired a band-of-brothers image. The Camden 28, like the Catonsville 9, the Harrisburg 7, and the Milwaukee 14 cultivated themselves as hard-edged peace warriors in defiance of a military industrial complex that poached young men from the urban poor. These Christian activists claimed to have destroyed over a million U.S. selective service documents between 1967 and 1973. Many Americans are familiar with the heroic brother priests, Phillip and Daniel Berrigan, who launched the movement with the Catonsville raid, evaded arrest through the assistance of a sympathetic Catholic underground, galvanized other raiders, and eventually served several years in prison. Yet no scholar has written a historical monograph about the Camden 28 or systematically explored the role of women. Not only does this story diverge from the traditional narratives of secular campus protest and take place in a city Americans would prefer to ignore, but those 28 names do not include the famous "Berrigan." It is for all these reasons that I am interested in the Camden 28.
ROBYN K. MALLETT, Ph.D. - Spring 2013
Robyn Mallett, Assistant Professor of Psychology, is conducting research on the factors that affect women’s responses to sexual harassment. Many people expect that a “reasonable person” would make an assertive response to sexual harassment. In fact, United States’ law relies on a reasonable person standard when evaluating sexual harassment cases. If sexual harassment occurred, then a woman is expected to make an immediate and assertive attempt to stop the harassment. Yet existing research finds that assertive confrontation is the exception rather than the rule. This research project investigates how the situation in which sexual harassment occurs may reduce assertive responses, including direct confrontation of one’s harasser. Women face the “double bind” of being both respected and liked in the workplace. If a woman’s only goal was to be respected, then responses to sexual harassment would commonly include confrontation of the offensive behavior. However, women must also gain and maintain the liking of their colleagues and supervisors in the service of getting or keeping a job. This competing goal to be liked may make women more hesitant to confront because they believe that doing so may put their job in jeopardy. Understanding the situational factors that reduce assertive responses may remove some of the burden from the targets of sexual harassment and change expectations for what constitutes a reasonable response. Results of this research will be disseminated through teaching, publication, and presentations on campus and at national conferences.
JOHN DUGAN, Ph.D. - Spring 2010
John Dugan, Assistant Professor of Higher Education, currently serves as principal investigator for the Multi-Institutional Study of Leadership (MSL), an international research program examining the influences of higher education on the development of college students' capacities for socially responsible leadership. Data from the study was collected at over 100 colleges and universities in the US, Canada, and Mexico and represent more than 115,000 respondents. The study is theoretically grounded in leadership principles congruent with both social justice and feminist leadership philosophies. Data will be used to examine two major questions. First, what is the pathway through which college women's overarching leadership potential (i.e., leadership efficacy, leadership capacity, and leadership behaviors) is developed? Second, what leadership learning experiences contribute most significantly to increasing the leadership efficacy, capacity, and behaviors of college women? Significant impediments to women's attainment of positional leadership roles persist despite a half century of political and educational initiatives targeted at increasing gender equity (Carli & Eagly, 2007; Rhode & Kellerman, 2007). The fact remains that women do not advance to the highest leadership positions in the same numbers, at the same rate, or through the same paths as male colleagues; women often are expected to work harder, contend with hostile or dismissive environments, accept unequal pay, receive less developmental support and training, and are frequently excluded from critical social networks (Caldwell-Colbert & Albino, 2007; Eagly & Carli, 2007). Differential treatment hardly begins in the workforce, though, as it is also present in the educational pipelines purportedly designed to prepare women to assume successful leadership roles in their disciplines. Findings from this research will address educational pipeline issues directly. Result should inform women's studies scholarship, existing coursework on leadership and gender in the Higher Education graduate program, and educational practice related to developing women's leadership potential.
PRUDENCE A. MOYLAN, Ph.D. - Spring 2009
Prudence A. Moylan, Professor of History, is integrating her decade long work on women and men as peace activists in Britain into a book on gender and peacemaking in the twentieth century. She explores the collaboration and contention among peace activists, peace organizations and feminist campaigns for equality to explain the century long process of establishing gender equality in law and practice as an essential foundation for building a peaceful society. Feminist peace activism in the twentieth century always included an understanding that peace could only be built on a foundation of equal rights while men's peace activism focused primarily on issues of conscientious objection to military service and armaments limitation. Feminist women supported men in the peace campaigns they initiated and advocated for the inclusion of women's rights as a peace issue. They also recognized that they had to organize on their own behalf to gain equality within the peace movement as well as in national and international law. The book demonstrates the contribution of women's rights campaigns to creating a more inclusive and robust theory and practice of peacemaking for the twenty first century.
ANN M. SHANAHAN, M.F.A. - Spring 2009
Ann Shanahan, Assistant Professor of Theatre in the Department of Fine and Performing Arts, is conducting research on the subject of women and creative leadership in relation to domestic space, specifically houses. Celebrating the Gannon Center's "housing" in the beautifully renovated Piper Hall, and a career long fascination with women and houses in dramatic literature, this three-part project relates research and teaching to the potential of staging plays about women in Piper Hall. The work of this program will ultimately solidify a relationship between the Theatre and WSGS, benefiting both in material ways, enrich teaching and public visibility of both the Arts and Women's Studies in campus and Chicago communities, significantly advance the Gannon Center Mission in support of women and leadership, and benefit current students and alumni in education and career building for women in creative leadership. The three parts of the project include formal presentation of research from a book length project on women theatre directors in Chicago through organization of an event/lecture series on women, creative leadership, and concepts of home. In order to link the project to teaching, Ms. Shanahan will re-offer Women's Theatre Workshop and adapt A Room of One's Own, the metaphoric frame for the course, in conjunction. As a part of this course students may access the Women & Leadership Archives for material on women and theatre in Mundelein College as research for final original dramatic pieces. Finally, this project will explore the feasibility of staging plays about women and houses in Piper Hall with potential for creating a formalized program in coming years, housed in the Center, devoted to performing plays about women and supporting women in creative leadership. The final outcome of the fellowship program would be a staging of a pilot production in Fall 2010.
