Gender and Women's Studies: ECS 2014

GWS majors and minors enjoying the luncheon.

Each spring, Villanova University’s Gender and Women’s Studies program hosts the annual Elizabeth Cady Stanton Conference. This year, in honor of its twenty-fifth anniversary, GWS joined forces with the Greater Philadelphia Women’s Studies Consortium to expand the conference and open it to students at area schools including the University of Delaware, Haverford College, Ursinus College, Temple University, West Chester, and others. Students were invited to showcase their work, discuss their interests with fellow students and faculty from the area, and see the broad range of intellectual disciplines that Gender and Women's Studies encompasses. Between the Villanova community and Greater Philadelphia schools, ECS welcomed close to 70 undergraduate and graduate students at this year’s conference!

Students presented on a series of fifteen different panels, and shared work on a variety of compelling topics, including but not limited to, gender and adolescence, women's health, sex and sexuality, representations of masculinity and femininity in pop-culture, pornography, war and the military, gender and economics, queer identity, and women in classical literature. In addition to this work, multiple students also presented creative projects (poetry, visual art, and performance) that engaged a variety of gender-related issues. Dr. Heidi Rose and Dr. Shauna McDonald (Communication) organized a performance showcase entitled "Embodying Text," which featured an interactive Q&A with the student performers.

Student presenters at ECS!

We are happy to announce that much of the amazing student scholarship presented at ECS will now be available to the Villanova community through our recently established Elizabeth Cady Stanton Student Research Proceedings website—a public online journal that archives each year’s collection of ECS papers. Our hope is that this site will encourage students and faculty to continue celebrating and engaging the important work of Gender and Women’s Studies. While ECS is a single day here at Villanova, the interdisciplinary work of this field is unfolding in departments, classrooms, and faculty and student scholarship, every day of the year.

The GWS program and the ECS committee would like to thank the Greater Philadelphia Women's Studies Consortium for joining Villanova University this year and helping us make this day a very memorable twenty-fifth anniversary. We would also especially like to thank the GWS steering committee and all GWS faculty and students who have contributed to the ECS conference over the last twenty-five years. The conference would not exist without your continued support, enthusiasm, and participation!