Hsiao-Lan Hu (pronouns: ze/hir/hir), Director of the WGS Program and Professor of Religious Studies, led a committee of international scholars to evaluate and organize the program for the 18th Sakyadhita International Conference on Buddhist Women, to be held in Seoul, Korea in June 2023. Upon the request of a board director of the Parliament of the World’s Religions, ze is organizing a panel on “The Global Ethic and the Challenging Path to Full Ordination for Buddhist Women” for the 9th meeting of The Parliament of the World’s Religions, to be held in Chicago in August 2023, and is invited to be a panelist on “Multi-Religious Perspectives on the Parliament’s Global Ethic” at the same meeting. Dr. Hu was a roundtable panelist on “Transcending and Transforming Catastrophes: Women of Color and Strategies for Survival” at the American Academy of Religion 2022 Annual Meetings, and will present on the roundtable panel on “Indigenous Feminism between India and China” at the 2023 Annual Meetings. On campus, ze served as a panelist on “Faith, Hope, and Love: Faith Through the LGBTQ+ Lens—An Interfaith Panel Discussion of Faith and Identity.”
Allegra Pitera, Professor of Architecture and Community Development, will collaborate with retired WGS faculty Professor Libby Blume to research under-represented architects and designers, mostly focusing on women.
Gail Presbey, Professor of Philosophy, published “Gandhi’s Encounter with the British Suffrage Movement: Lessons Learned,” in Gandhi’s Global Legacy: Moral Methods and Modern Challenges, ed. Veena Howard (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2023), 87-106, and “Wisdom from Women in Africa” and two of the appendices in Rethinking African Sage Philosophy: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on and Beyond H. Odera Oruka, eds. Kai Kresse and Oriare Nyarwath (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2023), 99-122. She also published a blogpost “The Work of Brave Women at the El Paso-Juarez Border” on the Sisters of Mercy website on June 23, 2022. Her journal article “How Nonviolent Movements in the Caribbean Influenced Pan-Africanism” will be published in Peace & Change: A Journal of Peace Research, 48/2 (2023). Professor Presbey presented a paper, “Catholics Supporting the Cuban Revolution: Dorothy Day in 1962, Betty Campbell and Peter Hinde in 1989” at a conference on “Construction of socialism in theory and practice” at Havana University Institute of Philosophy and Martin Luther King Center in Cuba in June 2022. She also organized the Bioneers conference hosted by Detroit Mercy in October 2022.