Tenured and tenure-track faculty at MTSU can apply until Wednesday, Feb. 29, 2012, for grants to help integrate of women’s experiences and perspectives into the curriculum.

The MTSU President’s Commission on the Status of Women will award three grants of $1,800 each for use in summer 2012 to revise an existing course, revise a general-education course for a study-abroad program, create a new course, revamp a current minor or create a new minor.

Winners of 2011 PCSW grants included Dr. Tricia Farwell, an assistant professor of journalism, who proposed a new course, “Sex and Gender in Advertising.” Farwell said in her winning proposal that she “hopes to assist the students in making connections regarding the impact on women (and men) of idealized beauty, overly sexualized images and other gendered topics.”

Dr. John Maynor, an associate professor of political science, received a grant to redesign “Human Rights,” a course that is taught each spring semester. The course’s current topics include human rights in relation to torture, war, economic globalization, international organizations and cultural relativity.

“The revised course will, in part, focus on the ways women’s experiences of human rights violations are gendered,” Maynor said in his successful grant proposal. “To that end, the revised course will examine the roles of custom and law in compromising women’s dignity and equality.”

Maynor’s revised course will include a two-part service-learning component: sex-trafficking issues with the cooperation of Free for Life International and women’s empowerment issues with the help of Humans in Crisis International.

The third 2011 grant winner, Dr. Amy Sayward of the Department of History, proposed a revision of “History of Sport in America” to include an examination of “the way in which sports help to construct and challenge identities—national, ethnic, racial, gender, sexual and community identities.

“I would like to explore the ways in which American sports history has both reinforced and challenged gender roles, as well as ideas of sexuality, over time,” Sayward noted in her winning proposal.

The PCSW’s Academic Issues Subcommittee will judge the proposals. Courses developed or revised for the undergraduate curriculum and those that can be implemented within two years will receive priority consideration.

Complete application guidelines are available at www.mtsu.edu/pcsw/grants.shtml.

For more information, contact Dr. Samantha Cantrell, PCSW chair, at 615-494-8751 or samantha.cantrell@mtsu.edu.

— Gina K. Logue (Gina.Logue@mtsu.edu)