Events

Gloria Kaufman joined the English faculty of IU South Bend in the mid 1960s, at a time when the campus was expanding its reach into the community.  In addition to teaching Chaucer, Shakespeare, and other classics, Gloria developed the course B250, the first Women’s Studies course on the South Bend campus. Her course, a speakers’ series open to the public, brought a number of influential and controversial guest lecturers to campus. It expanded the minds and spirits of generations of IU South Bend students. One of  her students noted that she taught them to “use our power to create kindness.”

Gloria Kaufman created the Women’s Studies program at IU South Bend, which has grown now to include a major and minor. She established the first Women’s Resource Center on the campus and served as affirmative action officer. Besides numerous scholarly articles in her field, she edited two anthologies of feminist humor: “Pulling Our Own Strings: Feminist Humor and Satire,” 1980 (with Mary Kay Blakely) and “In Stitches: A Patchwork of Feminist Humor,” 1991. A filmmaker, she wrote and directed 14 documentaries, with titles such as “Women, Ritual, and Religion” and “The Politics of Feminist Humor.” Upon retiring from the university, she began to produce videopoems, short two to six minute films combining words, music, and images. Gloria Kaufman left a strong, vibrant Women’s Studies program when she retired from IU South Bend. The current members of the Women’s Studies Governing Board embrace the challenge of carrying on her legacy for present and future IU South Bend students.

Thanks to generous community donations to the Kaufman Fund, we began a Gloria Kaufman Memorial Lecture series in 2005. Below is a list of our speakers.

Felicity Nussbaum from the English Department at UCLA was the inaugural speaker in January 2005

Judy Norsigian of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective and co-author of Our Bodies, Ourselves was our speaker in November 2005

Gail Bederman from the History Department at the University of Notre Dame was our speaker in March 2007

Janell Hobson from the  Women’s Studies Department at SUNY-Albany was our speaker in October 2008

Ellen Kossek from Michigan State University's Graduate School of Labor & Industrial Relations was our speaker in November 2009.

Kathleen Karlyn was our speaker in November 2010.

Betty Cockrum, President and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Indiana, was our speaker in November 2011.

Marge Piercy, poet and novelist, was our speaker in 2012.

S. Bear Bergman, author of Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation (Seal Press, 2010), was our speaker in 2013.

Jacquelin Campbell, of the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing, is a national expert on domestic violence prevention and danger assessment. She was our speaker in 2014.

Jessica Fields, San Francisco State University, spoke on her research on sexuality education in the U.S. in 2015

Emi Koyama gave a talk, entitled “Rescue is for kittens: state violence and the impact of anti-trafficking policies on queer and trans youth in the sex trade” in 2016

2018: Judith A. Allen: "Women's Sexualities & Alfred C. Kinsey's Sex Research."

2019: Andrea J. Ritchie: "Women and Police Violence"

2020: Julie Williams: "Queer, Crip, Disability Justice and Feminist Movements: How Do We Bring This Together?"

2021: Michelle Téllez: "Beyond the Wall: Fronteriza Imaginaries in the Everyday"

2022: Dionne Irving: "Commodifying Your Family for Fun and Profit: The Story Behind the Dionne Quintuplets and the Novel Quint"

2023: Muffet McGraw: "A Conversation with Muffet McGraw: Female Leadership, Sports and Title IX."

2024: Michelle Daniel Jones and Elizabeth Angeline Nelson: “Abolition and Feminist Pedagogy: The Indiana Women’s Prison History Project.”