Gloria Bowles

Gloria Bowles is the founding coordinator of UC Berkeley women's studies. Her latest book is Living Ideas: A Memoir of the Tumultuous Founding of Berkeley Women's Studies, available at www.gloriabowles.net.

With Renate Klein, she edited Theories of Women's Studies (Routledge, 1983), which sold over 8000 copies and was highly influential in providing the intellectual rationale for this new interdisciplinary discipline. Theories also explored feminist methodologies, probing among other questions the relationship between the feminist researcher and her "subjects."

Louise Bogan's Aesthetic of Limitation (Indiana, 1987) was the first book-length critical study of this neglected American woman poet written from a feminist perspective.

A posthumous collection of the essays of her colleague, Barbara Christian, the first Black woman to receive tenure at Berkeley, was published in 2007 by University of Illinois Press. New Black Feminist Criticism, 1985-2000, was edited by Bowles and two of Christian's former students, now professors, Giulia Fabi and Arlene Keizer. Christian died of cancer at the age of 56.