Deborah Rosenfelt

Ph.D. (1972) University of California-Los Angeles, M.A. (1965) Columbia University, B.A. (1964) Goucher College

Dr. Rosenfelt (also an affiliate of American Studies and Theatre) joined the department in the fall of 1989. Prior to coming to Maryland she served as Professor and Director of Women’s Studies at San Francisco State University and Professor of English at California State University, Long Beach. For twenty years, she directed UM’s Curriculum Transformation Project, which was charged with making the campus-wide curriculum inclusive of gender, race, class, sexual identity and expression, ability, and other aspects of human diversity. Her books include Encompassing Gender: Integrating International Studies and Women’s Studies, with Lay and Monk (2002), “Tell Me A Riddle” (Tillie Olsen) (1995); Feminist Criticism and Social Change: Sex, Class, and Race in Literature and Culture, with Newton (1986). She has authored many essays on 20th-century American women’s literary and cultural history, women artists and social change, and women’s studies and curricular change in higher education. She served as Project Director of a multi-year series of grants on internationalizing and gendering the curriculum funded by The Ford Foundation, and has served as a Fulbright and visiting scholar in the Ukraine and Hungary. She has consulted internationally on curricular development in women’s and gender studies. Her current project takes a new direction, combining memoir and oral history to examine collective living of the 1970’s as part of left feminist urban culture.

Major Areas of Research: Women’s studies and curriculum change in higher education Gender, globalization, and culture Contemporary North American women writers