Professor Keith Clark of the Mason English Department will be giving one of this year's George Mason Vision Series Lectures, entitled "Before Toni Morrison and Alice Walker: The Forgotten Fiction of Ann Petry." The lecture is Monday, February 27, 2012 at 7 p.m.

Jo-Marie Burt, faculty member in the Department of Public and International Affairs and director of the Latin American Studies program, spent much of the last semester in Peru, where she earned an award for her human rights work.

Scholar, artist and photographer Deborah Willis, who earned a PhD in cultural studies at George Mason University in 2002, will have her work on display at a Mason exhibit throughout February. The showcase, called "Progeny," features the work of Willis and her son, Hank Willis Thomas.

Mason English Professor Tamara Harvey is the guest editor of the most recent issue of Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers (Vol. 28, No. 2 (2011)), a special issue, “Women and Early America.”

Christine Hernandez, program coordinator of women and gender studies, was named "Outstanding New Professional" by the American College Personnel Association's Standing Committee for Multicultural Affairs (CMA) and the "Outstanding Emerging Professional" by the Standing Committee for Women. Each year the organization presents awards to professionals that have demonstrated success in their area of expertise and whose work is in alignment with its core values.

New Century College professor and recent author encourages students to find a passion to help others.

“The goal of this project is to study the design, implementation and dimensions for a new kind of school that is quietly emerging across the United States,” says Erin Peters Burton, co-principal investigator of the project and assistant professor of science education and educational psychology in Mason’s College of Education and Human Development. “Because this type of study has never been done before, no one really knows what an ‘inclusive STEM-focused school’ looks like and what works.”

The Gender, Power, and Violence course will focus on gender based violence in several institutions in the United States. Specifically, the course will explore the military, fraternities, sports, the Catholic church, and prisons- highly masculinized and sex segregated institutions. The class explores the ways in which structures create an environment that ripe for gender violence.

Danny Collier, director of IT and web development in the college, nominated Hernandez for the outstanding web support award. The two work together to discuss the program's web site. "The staff person to whom we are giving this award to has done a wonderful job not only of keeping her site accurate and up-to-date," Collier said. "She has worked to make the site truly convey the energy of her very active program."

The course will focus on a redefinition and an expansion of the traditional view of human rights which has long focused on public actions (state-sponsored terrorism, for example) so that women's rights in both the public and private spheres can be included--rights that protect the female body from being an object of punishment and violation; universal, fundamental, and inalienable rights that go beyond cultural and religious traditions.