Welcome!

Hi Everyone,

I would like to welcome you all to a class that I am very excited to teach, “Imagining Gender: Exploring Narratives of Technology.”  I feel so lucky to have an extraordinary group of students to work with and learn together about some topics that are important to me.

I would also like to welcome my colleague Emily Sherwood, who will be our Instructional Technology Fellow for the class.  Emily is an accomplished scholar with a speciality in instructional technology, besides being an all-around smart, resourceful, and nice person.

A little about me and why I wanted to teach this class…

I am an English teacher by training, and my work is focused on the early 20th century, and especially the time around and between WWI and WWII.  The late 19th and early 20th centuries (like the late 20th and early 21st centuries!) were a time a great technological expansion, which caused both a lot of excitement and anxiety.  The first World War did a lot to complicate beliefs about the symmetry of “technology” and “progress”–new war technologies led to massive loss of life.  And how does gender fit into this?  Not coincidentally, it was a time of changing and expanding rights for some women, changes in fashion, gender roles, and more.  Understanding how gender and politics change in reaction to, with, and through technology has been a big part of my research work.  Like Emily, I was also an ITF, and using technological tools for active learning and projects has been a huge part of my teaching work.  I am delighted to bring them both together in this class.

As you probably already know, this class is part of FemTechNet’s DOCC experiment.  When I heard about the FemTechNet project, I knew I wanted to be part of it, and I knew Macaulay was the right place to do it.  We’ll have a chance to talk to students and professors from other schools, and to all learn together.

So what I’d really like now is to hear more about you and why you wanted to take the class.  Please post an introduction for yourself and make sure to categorize it as “Introduction.”  I am looking forward to a great semester with you!