The Jane Newman files on the Women's Studies program at UCI (University of California, Irvine) contains materials related to Newman's time as the Director of Women's Studies at UCI between 1988 and c. 1994, including her role in helping establish the Interdisciplinary B.A. Major in Women's Studies and Ph.D. Feminist Emphasis as well as the courses she taught in Women's Studies and Comparative Literature at UCI. These materials include memos, budgets, outreach programs to local women's groups and high schools, UC systemwide Women's Studies collaborations, posters of events, research relating to women in higher education, syllabi, flyers, course schedules, strategic plans, newsletters, meeting minutes and agendas, articles and course materials, and correspondence. The Women's Studies program at UCI began in 1975 through the efforts of a group of faculty, staff, and students, who saw women's studies programs developing at other campuses across the United States and argued for a similar program at UCI. Classes on various women and gender topics/themes began to appear in the course catalog in the latter half of the 1970s, both under the Women's Studies Program as well as cross-listed with other schools and departments such as Humanities, Social Ecology, and Social Science. In 1976-1977, a Women's Studies Concentration was developed and in 1984 a major emphasis in the School of Humanities and later a minor were passed. A free standing major and minor were approved in 1992, followed by a graduate emphasis in feminist studies in 1994. In 1997-1998 an external review committee recommended the Interdisciplinary Program in Women's Studies should be a department offering a major and minor, permanently located in Humanities. The first formal proposal for creation of a department was put forward in 2000 and 2005, leading to the creation of the Women's Studies department on June 30, 2007. A minor in Queer Studies was established in 2005. The department's name was later changed to from Women's Studies to Gender & Sexuality Studies in 2014. Jane O. Newman is a professor of comparative literature at UC Irvine, with research interest in topics such as 16th- and 17-century German literature, Contemporary Theory and Criticism, and Feminism. She earned her PhD at Princeton University and her BA at Yale University. Her primary fields are Renaissance and Early Modern English, French, German, Italian and neo-Latin literature and culture. She has also published and taught courses on Walter Benjamin and Erich Auerbach; the history of the discipline of Comparative Literature; theories and methods of Comparative Literature; Realism and its Discontents; translation theory; new historicism and cultural materialism; Cold War Renaissance and Baroque Studies. Newman’s published works include: Pastoral Conventions:Poetry, Language and Thought in Seventeenth-Century Nuremberg (1990), The Intervention of Philology:Gender, Learning, and Power in Lohenstein's Roman Plays (2000), and Benjamin's Library: Modernity, Nation, and the Baroque: Modernity, Nation, and the Baroque (2011)as well as the English-language translator of a selection of Erich Auerbach's essays (2014; ppb. 2016) in addition to numerous articles. Her awards include Guggenheim and Humboldt fellowships, the M.H. Abrams Fellowship at the National Humanities Center, and the John P. Birkelund Fellow in the Humanities at the American Academy in Berlin. Newman was also a Senior Fulbright Scholar at the Freie Universität Berlin. Source: Jane O. Newman UCI Faculty Profile. Accessed 1/2024. UCI Gender and Sexuality Studies, About the Department. Accessed 1/2024.

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