Five Colleges, Incorporated: New director for Women's Studies Research Center

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Five College Women's Studies Research Center picks new director

Karen Remmler, professor of German studies, critical social thought, and gender studies at Mount Holyoke College, has been chosen to serve a three-year term as the director of the Five College Women's Research Studies Center beginning this fall.

Founded in 1991 on the interests and strengths of some 350 women's studies scholars at the member campuses of the Five College Consortium, the Five College Women's Studies Research Center offers regular programming of speakers, symposia and discussion groups. The center also encourages critical feminist scholarship from diverse perspectives by hosting as many as 18 associates for up to eight months each year. The associates benefit from sharing their work with each other, a relationship with a mentor in their field, the Five College women's studies community, and the plethora of resources at the campuses. The center has hosted more than 300 scholars from 28 states and 44 countries.

Remmler, who has taught at Mount Holyoke since 1990 and will continue teaching with a reduced course load, has focused much of her research on German Jewish women writers and the politics and gender of memory in the aftermath of atrocity. She co-directed the campus' Weissman Center for Leadership and the Liberal Arts from 2000 to 2005 and helped design a new gender studies department at Mount Holyoke. She says that she would like to build on the work of her predecessors at the Women's Studies Research Center.

"I would like the center to be a place for researchers to carve out time and space, yes," she says, "but also a place for lively exchange, and the development of concrete approaches to bringing women's voices into public arenas and media."

By working closely with Five College Executive Director Neal Abraham and the deans of the five campuses, Remmler says she will ensure "that initiatives engendered throughout the Five Colleges could lead to more direct involvement with the center and with the diverse group of faculty colleagues, students and staff members with foci in women's and gender studies."

"The Five College Deans and I are pleased to have recruited a faculty colleague of Karen Remmler's exceptional scholarly, teaching, mentoring and administrative talent to lead one of our signature Five College centers, which serves the largest regional group of women's studies scholars in the country," says Neal Abraham. "We look forward to working closely with her to strengthen the center and its interactions with the women's and gender studies programs on our five campuses."

"Karen comes to the position with both administrative experience and a longstanding commitment to the center and to women's studies," says Arlene Avakian, director of the Women's Studies Program at UMass Amherst and chair of the search committee. "I know the steering committee is looking forward to working with Karen, who has the skills and the vision to build on the prodigious accomplishments of past directors and take the center to the next stage."

Remmler is the author of Waking the Dead: Correspondences between Walter Benjamin's Concept of Remembrance and Ingeborg Bachmann's "Way's of Dying" and the coeditor, with Sander Gilman, of Reemerging Jewish Culture in Germany: Life and Literature since 1989. In 2002, she coedited, with Leslie Morris, the anthology Contemporary Jewish Writing in Germany. With Mount Holyoke English Professor Christopher Benfey, Remmler co-edited Artists, Intellectuals, and World War II: The Pontigny Encounters at Mount Holyoke College, 1942-1944.

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