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CLAS Names Fonow to Direct Women’s Studies

Mary Margaret Fonow, currently associate professor of Women’s Studies at Ohio State University and Fellow in the Center for the Study of Law, Social Science and Policy in the Moritz College of Law at OSU has been named Director of the Women’s Studies Program in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University.

“Dr. Fonow is a gifted scholar with a strong track record as an administrator,” noted David Young, ASU Vice President and Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. “She is ideally qualified to direct our Women’s Studies Program, which offers high-quality interdisciplinary study in the humanities and social sciences, and will help the unit move to become one of the premier programs of its kind in the country.”

Fonow is a sociologist by training, with research interests in gender and social movements, including feminist transnational labor activism and in feminist methodology and pedagogy.

Her recent book, Union Women: Forging Feminism in the United Steelworkers of America (University of Minnesota Press in 2003) examines how a feminist agenda took hold in a male-dominated union. Fonow studies how feminism and labor politics intersect – how women in the union developed a collective identity as “Women of Steel” and how that political identity was related to their involvement in both the labor movement and the women‘s movement. She has also been the editor or co-editor of three collections of scholarship in Women’s Studies and has published 18 articles in the field.

Fonow’s scholarship is both multi-disciplinary and international. She has done research in Amsterdam, Geneva, Brussels, and most recently in Australia where she served as a Visiting Scholar at the University of South Australia in Adelaide. She has been at OSU since 1985, including nine years as assistant director of the university’s Center for Women’s Studies. She has also taught at Otterbein College and Denison University.