Chairwoman Named for Women’s Studies

A college administrator from Montana has been named chairwoman of Cal State Northridge’s women’s studies department, the university has announced.

Julia Watson, who has been the director of the women’s studies program at the University of Montana’s Missoula campus since 1993, will join CSUN on Aug. 22. She had been a professor of liberal studies at the college since 1988.

Watson received a bachelor’s degree in German and English at Western Michigan University in 1967, and a master’s degree and PhD in comparative literature from UC Irvine in 1970 and 1979, respectively.

Before joining the University of Montana, she was a faculty member at Elizabethtown College, Hobart College, William Smith College and the University of Massachusetts. Watson’s research includes autobiography, women’s writing and feminist theory, and her work has been published in a number of literary journals.

During her academic and professional careers, Watson has studied in Yugoslavia, Germany, Japan, India and Mexico City. In 1992-93, she spent a year teaching American literature at the University of Dakar in Senegal on a Fulbright fellowship.

“Our situation here is relatively privileged compared with theirs,” she told the Montana Kaimin, the campus newspaper. “There was a passion among many of them for ideas, literature, and that was really stimulating.”