Tag Archives: feminism

UW Press announces new book series: Women and Gender in Africa

The University of Wisconsin Press is pleased to announce the launch of a new book series, Women and Gender in Africa, edited by Jacqueline-Bethel Mougoué and Aili Mari Tripp. The series seeks to publish innovative book-length works, based on original research, primarily in the areas of history, politics, and cultural studies.

Jacqueline-Bethel Mougoué, associate professor of African cultural studies and history at UW–Madison, says, “I am thrilled to highlight the works of innovative scholars who bring fresh perspectives on issues of gender and women in Africa. We are especially excited to focus on scholarship that transcends traditional scholarly frameworks by defying disciplinary boundaries and geographical constraints, exploring diverse methods, and spanning the vast expanse of the African continent.”

The series welcomes submissions that address questions and debates of broad theoretical, empirical, and methodological significance of interest to a wide readership, including manuscripts that demonstrate the comparative implications of women’s experiences across and beyond the African continent. The editors are especially interested in such topics as women and religion, sexuality, LGBTQI+ concerns, human rights, migration, health, the family, the environment, law, conflict resolution, race and ethnicity, women’s movements and feminism, and globalization. Projects addressing agency are particularly welcome, including authority, political and spiritual leadership, economic activity, and forms of knowledge and healing. The series welcomes manuscripts that incorporate discussions of literature and popular culture, representation and identity construction, and testimony and life writing.

For Aili Mari Tripp, Vilas Research Professor of Political Science at UW–Madison, the series is an opportunity “to give visibility to the growing body of first-rate research in Africa and beyond that focuses on women’s agency and challenges in a wide variety of social science and humanities fields.”

The series advisory board includes Ousseina Alidou (Rutgers University, USA), Nwando Achebe (Michigan State University, USA), Naminata Diabate (Cornell University, USA), Ainehi Edoro (University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA), Marc Epprecht (Queens University, Canada), Shireen Hassim (Carleton University, Canada), Dorothy Hodgson (Brandeis University, USA), Stanlie James (Arizona State University, USA), Alice Kang (University of Nebraska–Lincoln, USA), Siphokazi Magadla (Rhodes University, South Africa), Fatima Sadiqi (Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University, Morocco), Laura Ann Twagira (Wesleyan University, USA), and Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso (Brandeis University, USA).

Editor in chief Nathan MacBrien adds, “The University of Wisconsin Press has long had a commitment to publishing scholarship on Africa, and in particular writing on women’s lived experience in Africa. This new series provides inspiration for us, and the disciplines, to both broaden and deepen our commitments by giving space to imaginative work from new generations of scholars in Africa and across the world.”

Manuscripts will be selected based on significance of the topic, quality of scholarship, clarity and style of presentation, list balance, and marketability. For more information about submission, please contact Nathan MacBrien, editor in chief, at macbrien@wisc.edu. For other inquiries, please contact the series editors, Jacqueline-Bethel Mougoué (jmougou@wisc.edu) and Aili Mari Tripp (atripp@wisc.edu).

About the University of Wisconsin Press

The University of Wisconsin Press is a not-for-profit publisher of books and journals. With more than 1,500 titles and 8,000 peer-reviewed articles in print, its mission embodies the Wisconsin Idea by publishing work of distinction that serves the people of Wisconsin and the world.

Christina Stoddard talks about poetry, Mormonism, feminism, gang violence, and revenge

Christina Stoddard is the author of the poetry collection HIVE, for which she is the winner of the 2014 Brittingham Prize in Poetry. Hive has just been published by the University of Wisconsin Press. We spoke with Stoddard about this fierce debut collection of poems about brutality, exaltation, rebellion, and allegiance.

Stoddard-Hive-c

I needed to write a poem that was absolutely boiling over with rage.

Where did the title of the book come from? Why Hive?   Beehives are actually an important symbol in Mormon culture, and have been dating back to pioneer times. The exact reason why is not known for sure, but there are a few theories. One is that honeybees embody many qualities that the Church teaches its members to prize: harmony, industriousness, order, communal labor. Everyone performing their assigned role and everyone working together for the common good. Bees are cohesive and single-minded, not individual. Bees don’t deviate from the path they’re given—and thematically that is perfect for my book, which is about a teenage girl who is doing exactly that: deviating from the path she’s supposed to follow. Utah’s nickname is the Beehive State—even though they don’t really raise bees there and Utah doesn’t produce a lot of honey.

I gather from the book that you did not grow up in Utah, however.   No, I didn’t. I was born in the Pacific Northwest and grew up in Tacoma, WA, which is where the book is set. But my father is from Utah, and we visited relatives there often, so I’m familiar with a few cities in Utah.

How long did it take you to write the book?  That’s a little difficult to answer, because I spent many years

Christina Stoddard

Christina Stoddard

trying to write it and mostly failing. Originally what I produced weren’t poems, they were more like polemics. I was a very angry person in my teens and twenties, and I had to work through that anger first. A few of the poems have existed in some form for more than a decade. But most of the book was written over a period of three years, 2010 to 2013, after I had taken some creative writing workshops from poets Claudia Emerson and Ellen Bryant Voigt. Those women gave me the keys that unlocked everything else.

What sorts of keys?  I took a summer workshop at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, from Claudia Emerson, and when she read the group of poems I had turned in for class, Claudia basically told me that it seemed like I was phoning it in. She said I wasn’t pushing myself in either form or subject matter, and she challenged me to do better.

Really?  Yes. That hurt at first, certainly, but I decided there were two options: I could either give up and go sulk in the corner, or I could fling myself off a cliff of experimentation and see what happened. I chose the cliff. I started trying to write lyric poems, whereas previously my style had been very chatty, straightforward and plain, very rooted in story, what are often called narrative poems. A narrative poem has a beginning, middle, and end, and there’s usually a lot of context about what’s going on.

I took that new lyrical work and applied the next summer to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. I had no idea if the poems were any good—they were way outside of my comfort zone. But I got accepted, and I took a workshop with Ellen Bryant Voigt. Ellen once  . . .  Full interview continued here Continue reading →