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Teaching in the Program for the Study of Women and Gender has given me access to an inspiring network of faculty and to interdisciplinary perspectives that have shaped the questions that are most important to me in both my teaching and research. I've learned an enormous amount from designing the core courses in the major with other Program faculty. My literature courses in contemporary women’s poetry and in the cultural work of queer memoirs combine the approaches of feminist literary theory and cultural studies.

During the 1980s, Marilyn Schuster and I collaborated in leading faculty workshops around the country to help teachers integrate the insights of women's studies and ethnic studies and femininst teching strategies into traditional courses. We helped design and evaluate women's studies programs or curriculum transformation projects for more than fifty colleges and universities and about twenty secondary schools. Our experience led to co-editing Women's Place in the Academy: Transforming the Liberal Arts (1985).

My second book draws on the Sylvia Plath archives housed in the Rare Book collection here at Smith. Revising Life: Sylvia Plath's Ariel Poems (University of North Carolina, 1993) analyzes the interrelationships of gender and the creative process, especially the ways Plath reworked autobiography in composing and revising her late poems. I've also written about other contemporary American women poets: an essay on Rita Dove is included in Women Poets of the Americas: Toward a Pan-American Gathering (Notre Dame, 1999), and a piece on Cathy Song is in Re-Placing America: Conversations and Contestations (University of Hawaii, 1999).

A challenging and exciting project of the late 1990s Meridians, a new feminist interdisciplinary journal whose goal is to provide a forum for the finest scholarship and creative work by and about women of color in a U.S. and an international context. Our inaugural issue was published in the fall of 2000.We know after nearly a decade of work for the journal that a journal like Meridianscan make a significant difference in the academic lives of women scholars, in shaping the future of feminist scholarship, and in the education we offer our students at all levels. See moe about the journal, the current editor, Paula Giddings, and the current issue at the Meridians website.

BOOKS

Women's Place in the Academy by Professor Susan Van Dyne and Professor Marilyn Schuster

The explosion of knowledge resulting from recent research on women and minorities has posed what has often proved to be a thorny question: How is this new knowledge to be incorporated into the existing undergraduate curriculum? Simply "adding on" to more traditional courses falls short of the task, which is to find more effective ways of achieving genuine integration with existing curricula. Schuster and Van Dyne have compiled a unique anthology of original essays that address this pressing question not only by providing the essential theoretical framework , but also by reviewing political strategies adequate to the task of bringing the liberal arts curriculum into the 21st century.

These case studies and tested strategies from colleges and universities nationwide can now receive the national attention they deserve and will be especially valued for their practical approach to the limitations of traditional college settings.

This volume will be a useful resource for teachers, administrators and anyone concerned with curriculum development and the quality of undergraduate education in our schools.

Revising Life: Sylvia Plath's Ariel Poems by Professor Susan Van Dyne
Winner of "Outstanding Academic Book" (Choice)

(from inside the book jacket) For Sylvia Plath, revising life was a personal and poetic need, nowhere more evident than in the enormous body of work known as the Ariel poems, written during 1962-63, in the turbulent last six months of her life. In this work of feminist literary criticism, Susan Van Dyne examines for the first time the massive manuscript evidence for twenty-five of these poems, revealing the startling complexity of their gestation and revision from first draft to final form.

Van Dyne's reading of the Ariel poems juxtaposes three contexts: Plath's private journal from 1957 to 1959 (especially as it reveals her expectations of what it meant to be a middle-class wife and mother and an aspiring writer in 1950's America), the interpretive strategies of feminist theory, and Plath's multiple revisions of the poems.

By examining the various drafts of these poems, which Plath correctly predicted would make her name, Van Dyne reveals Plath as a resourceful creator and self-conscious critic of her own work. She illuminates Plath's craft and reveals unsuspected dimensions of the most famous poems: "Daddy," "Medusa," "Lady Lazarus," "Fever 103," "Ariel" and the bee poems.

Van Dyne argues that Plath's creative choices are both symptomatic and strategic: symptomatic in that they suggest her culture's powerful influence on her imagination and strategic in that they represent her own efforts to rewrite her lived experience in a poetics of survival. In revising her life, Plath also revised our understanding of what it means to be a woman.