Faculty Profile
Amy Farrell
(she/her/hers)Professor of American Studies and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies; James Hope Caldwell Memorial Chair (1991)
Contact Information
Denny Hall Room 306
Bio
Amy E. Farrell is the James Hopes Caldwell Memorial Chair and Professor of American Studies and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Dickinson College. Her research focuses on representations of gender and feminism in popular culture, the history and representation of the body and fatness, the history of second wave feminism, and girlhood studies. She is the author of Yours in Sisterhood: Ms. Magazine and the Promise of Popular Feminism (University of North Carolina Press, 1998) and Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture (New York University Press, 2011), as well as the editor of The Contemporary Reader of Gender and Fat Studies (Routledge, 2023). Her newest book, on the history of the Girl Scouts in the USA, is forthcoming from the University of North Carolina Press in 2025. A frequent media commentator, Farrell has appeared on the Colbert Report and shared her research on national popular media, including Bitch, the New Yorker, Psychology Today, NPR, and CNN. From 2019-2020 she served as an American Council of Learned Societies Fellow, in 2021-22 as a Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and in 2023 she was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Research Grant.
Education
- B.A., Ohio University, 1985
- M.A., University of Minnesota, 1988
- Ph.D., 1991
Awards
- Dickinson Award for Distinguished Teaching, 2005-06
2025-2026 Academic Year
Fall 2025
WGSS 200 Feminist Pract, Writing & Rsrc
Building upon the key concepts and modes of inquire introduced in the WGSS Introductory course, WGSS 200 deepens students’ understanding of how feminist perspectives on power, experience, and inequality uniquely shape how scholars approach research questions, writing practices, methods and knowledge production. Approaches may include feminist approaches to memoir, oral histories, grassroots and online activism, blogging, visual culture, ethnography, archival research, space, art, literary analysis, and policy studies.Prerequisite: 100 or 208, which can be taken concurrently.
AMST 202 Workshop in Cultural Analysis
This intensive writing workshop focuses on theoretical approaches to the interpretation of social and cultural materials. The course provides an early exposure to theories and methods that will be returned to in upper level departmental courses. Intended to develop independent skills in analysis of primary texts and documents.Prerequisite: Any AMST course or permission of instructor.