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News and Views
Fall 1999 Volume 10, Issue 1
Introducing Our New Undergraduate / Graduate Coordinator
Milagros Pena, Graduate/Undergraduate Coordinator, CWSGR
I am pleased to be joining the University of Florida faculty this fall with a joint position in the Center for Women's Studies and Gender Research and the Department of Sociology. I am visiting from New Mexico State University and will be teaching a course titled "Women of Color in U.S. Society" for the CWSGR in Spring 2000.
I received my PhD in Sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1990. My areas of research and teaching specialization are: race and ethnic relations with an emphasis on Latinas and Latinos, social movements, womens studies with an emphasis on Latinas, and the sociology of religion among Latinas and Latinos in the U.S. and Latin America.
My research and teaching interests are shaped by my family history. I was born in New York City to immigrant parents from the Dominican Republic and raised in a predominantly Latino/a inner city environment until I was fourteen when my mother moved to Astoria, Queens, New York. Growing up in an inner city environment has shaped my research and teaching focus. My 1995 book, titled Theologies and Liberation in Peru: The role of ideas in social movements looked to advance our knowledge of poor peoples movements, the social processes involved in engaging intellectuals, in this case theologians, in poor peoples movements, and more generally the role of ideas in social movements.
In 1994, with a Fulbright-Hays/García Robles Research Fellowship to Mexico, I began a new book project that provides a comparative analysis of Latina mobilization in Michoacán, Mexico and the greater El Paso, Texas area of the U.S. This research looks at womens NGOs contributions in Michoacán, Mexico to the 1995 United Nations international conference on women, providing a unique opportunity to compare how and why the breadth of mobilization in Michoacán differs from that of the greater El Paso, Texas area. I am also finishing a collaborative project with Ada María Isasi-Díaz tentatively titled Latina Womens Embodiment and Sexuality. The research analyzes focused group and questionnaire data collected regionally in the United States that included all the major Latino/a groups focusing on questions relating to Latina attitudes and views on sexuality, their bodies, and their experiences with their religious institutions relating to these issues. We hope to have the book available next year. Some results from the research appeared in 1998 in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion titled "Latina Religious Practice: Analyzing Cultural Dimensions in Measures of Religiosity."
My teaching interests also reflect the commitment I have to teach in related areas to what sparked my interest in sociology in the first place. I consistently try to challenge students to see our society as a multi-ethnic and multicultural one deeply marked by racism and sexism. The classroom exchanges among and with students invariably has made me a better teacher and scholar. I like to think of my teaching and research as a forum for impacting thinking as part of sparking all of our commitments to social change. I look forward to my year here in the Center for Womens Studies and Gender Research, not only as Graduate and Undergraduate Director, but for the opportunity to work with and meet all of you who have contributed one way or another to the Center.
