Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Writer/contact:  Kim Cretors, 706/542-1168, kcretors@franklin.uga.edu

UGA names new director of Institute for Women’s Studies

Athens, Ga. – The University of Georgia has appointed a new director of its Institute for Women’s Studies.  Chris Cuomo, currently a philosophy professor at the University of Cincinnati, will begin her new post in August, pending approval by the University System of Georgia Board of Regents.

“Chris Cuomo’s unique role as a feminist philosopher and the interdisciplinary nature of her work made her the ideal match for the Institute of Women’s Studies,” says Garnett S. Stokes, dean of the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, which administers the institute.  “We eagerly look forward to welcoming her to campus.”

Cuomo holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Madison-Wisconsin. Her teaching and research interests lie in the fields of political and feminist philosophies, Kantian ethics, philosophy and race, theories of justice, environmental ethics, and performance studies.

She is the author of Feminist Ecological Communities: An Ethic of Flourishing, which one reviewer called “an important contribution to the critical literature on feminist and ecological feminist thought.”  According to Cuomo, her most recent book, The Philosopher Queen: Feminists Essays on War, Love, and Knowledge (nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and an American Philosophical Association Book Award) is a collection of post-9/11 political essays proposing an ethic that is life-affirming yet politically and scientifically realistic. Her co-edited collections include Whiteness: Feminist Philosophical Reflections and Feminist Philosophies: An Introductory Reader, forthcoming later this year.

Cuomo’s research includes a project with two colleagues, funded with a grant from the National Science Foundation, to study climate and environment on Alaska’s North Slope by combining “western” science with the traditional knowledge of the Inupiaq (Eskimo) elders who live in the far North.

She also has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Charles Phelps Taft Fund, and she has held visiting positions at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University and the Institute for Science, Technology, and Policy Studies at Murdoch University in Australia.

In addition to her role as director of the women’s studies institute at UGA, Cuomo will serve as a faculty member in the Department of Philosophy.

Cuomo was chosen from a field of three finalists selected by a university search committee chaired by Doris Kadish, professor of Romance languages and interim director of the institute. The three finalists visited with both undergraduate and graduate students at the institute and delivered a lecture.

The Institute of Women’s Studies Institute is a unit of UGA’s Franklin College of Arts and Sciences and provides a feminist interdisciplinary perspective on women and gender. The institute cooperates with departments of all schools and colleges at UGA in developing its curriculum and programming.  The Franklin College serves more than 16,000 undergraduate and graduate students each year through the teaching and research of more than 630 faculty members as well as through the resources of 30 academic departments and more than 20 centers and programs. For more information, visit www.franklin.uga.edu and www.uga.edu/%7Ewsp/.

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(Photo courtesy of the University of Cincinnati/Lisa Ventre.)