MOUNT VERNON -- The
women's studies program at Cornell College will mark 20 years with a commemorative lecture by program founder professor Diane Crowder on Thursday, April 22, at 11:10 a.m. in Hedges Conference Room of The Commons. Admission is free.
Crowder, professor of French and women's studies, will talk about Monique Wittig, French writer, theorist and a founding leader of the French feminist and lesbian movements, in a lecture titled "Remembering Wittig: A Personal Memoire."
Crowder has published numerous articles on Wittig's works and was one of three American scholars invited to participate in an international conference in Paris in 2001 recognizing the publication of Wittig's collected articles in her native France. The French newsweekly Le Nouvel Observateur commented that Wittig was the most important philosopher in the global feminist movement since Simone de Beauvoir published "The Second Sex" in 1949. Wittig died in 2003 at the age of 68.
Crowder was instrumental in founding Cornell's women's studies program in 1984. She also developed each of the three core courses in the women's studies major: Theory and Methodology of Women's Studies, Feminist Theories and the Senior Seminar. Today Cornell's women's studies program is an interdisciplinary program that includes approximately 20 faculty who represent a wide range of disciplines at Cornell.
