Interim Association Director of the Honors Program

faculty

Catherine Villanueva Gardner, PhD

Professor

Women's & Gender Studies

508-999-8253

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Liberal Arts 356

Education

1996University of VirginiaPhD

Teaching

Programs

Teaching

Courses

Offered as needed to present current topics in the field or other material of interest. The specific topic is stated when the course is scheduled. May be repeated with change of content.

Basic concepts and perspectives in Women's Studies, placing women's experience at the center of interpretation. With focus on women's history and contemporary issues, the course examines women's lives with emphasis on how gender interacts with race, class, sexual orientation, and ethnicity. The central aim is to foster critical reading and thinking about women's lives: how the interlocking systems of oppression, colonialism, racism, sexism, and ethnocentrism shape women's lives; and how women have worked to resist these oppressions. This course satisfies a social science distribution requirement and the general education diversity requirement.

Basic concepts and perspectives in Women's Studies, placing women's experience at the center of interpretation. With focus on women's history and contemporary issues, the course examines women's lives with emphasis on how gender interacts with race, class, sexual orientation, and ethnicity. The central aim is to foster critical reading and thinking about women's lives: how the interlocking systems of oppression, colonialism, racism, sexism, and ethnocentrism shape women's lives; and how women have worked to resist these oppressions. This course satisfies a social science distribution requirement and the general education diversity requirement.

Basic concepts and perspectives in Women's Studies, placing women's experience at the center of interpretation. With focus on women's history and contemporary issues, the course examines women's lives with emphasis on how gender interacts with race, class, sexual orientation, and ethnicity. The central aim is to foster critical reading and thinking about women's lives: how the interlocking systems of oppression, colonialism, racism, sexism, and ethnocentrism shape women's lives; and how women have worked to resist these oppressions. This course satisfies a social science distribution requirement and the general education diversity requirement.

Basic concepts and perspectives in Women's Studies, placing women's experience at the center of interpretation. With focus on women's history and contemporary issues, the course examines women's lives with emphasis on how gender interacts with race, class, sexual orientation, and ethnicity. The central aim is to foster critical reading and thinking about women's lives: how the interlocking systems of oppression, colonialism, racism, sexism, and ethnocentrism shape women's lives; and how women have worked to resist these oppressions. This course satisfies a social science distribution requirement and the general education diversity requirement.

Topics will be determined by the faculty member and will therefore vary.

Teaching

Online and Continuing Education Courses

Feminist theorizing of the twenty-first century. The course will focus on key issues in fourth-wave feminism and how social media has been used to highlight and address them, including a recognition of diversity and an emphasis on intersectionality; body shaming and rape culture; and the disruption of gender categories.  
Register for this course.

Research

Research interests

  • Ethics
  • History of Women Philosophers
  • Feminist Theory
  • Philosophy and Literature

Professor Catherine Villanueva Gardner specializes in feminist philosophy, especially ethics, epistemology, and the retrieval of forgotten historical women philosophers. This latter retrieval of excluded philosophers from the canon is both an historical project and a social justice project. Gardner is currently working on retrieving neglected or marginalized African-American women philosophers from the nineteenth century, in particular Frances E.W. Harper, who began her activist work in New Bedford, MA. Gardner’s most recent book (PSU Press, 2012) explores whether there is a distinctive feminist approach to the history of philosophy. Gardner has also published two other books in feminist history of philosophy and multiple articles in journals and edited collections.