In celebration of Women's History Month, a two-day panel titled “Women Breaking Boundaries” brought together three distinguished female scholars to share their expertise and insights. The event, held on March 11-12, featured presentations from professors specializing in diverse fields ranging from British literature to military history.
The first session, which took place on Tuesday, March 11, from 12:15 PM to 1:00 PM in LAB 101, included a panel of Dr. Nicolle Jordan, Associate Professor of English; Dr. Laura Mammina, Assistant Professor of History; and Dr. Katya Maslakowski, Assistant Professor of History. Each professor contributed their expertise to this discussion centered on gender and its role in historical and literary analysis.
Jordan specializes in British literature, particularly 18th-century women’s writing and literary history. Mammina’s research focuses on the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction, slavery and emancipation, and gender in wartime. Dr. Maslakowski studies modern British history, the British Empire, the history of science and medicine, and military history, with a focus on gender and sexuality studies.
During the session, Mammina shared her academic journey.
“I wasn’t educated by gender scholars in my undergraduate career,” Mammina explained. “I had some faculty, or most of my advisors, who were male, and I mean, I think they tried to do their best, but it was mostly just like, ‘Here’s a book about women,’ you know? And so discovering gender as a category of analysis was really helpful for me.”
She continued, “I was under the impression that women in history couldn’t do very much, and then you find this much more capacious understanding of gender, and you think, like, this opens up a whole kind of new role in which we can investigate these things. It’s not about just studying men doing things or women doing things. It’s also about the ways in which different societies think about these concepts—what does it mean to be a man, what does it mean to be a woman, or to be masculine, feminine, or nonbinary?”
Maslakowski emphasized the importance of gender analysis.
“It doesn’t have to be a political statement that gender is important to study,” Maslakowski explained. “And that’s why masculinity studies need to be incorporated more fully into our conversations about gender. Because then it’s not just, ‘add women into history and stir,’ right? It becomes, let’s think about how we operate in the world differently because of our perceived gender and how that impacts the things we’re allowed to do, the things we can’t do, the things we feel we need to prove ourselves in.”
She added, “Everybody approaches the world through a lens of gender, whether we want to or not, gender is one of the basic categories that culture is constructed out of.”
The panelists’ discussion provided insight into how gender shapes historical narratives, literature, and individual experiences. They encouraged the audience to reflect on their own perspectives on gender and its role in shaping both the past and present.
