Alumna lectures on women’s movements

Alumna lectures on global women’s movements, human rights & sexuality

News contact: Laura Hancock | University Advancement
541-962-3585 or lhancock@eou.edu
Source contact: Ryan Dearinger | History Department
541-962-3709 or rdearinger@eou.edu 

May 21, 2015

LA GRANDE, Ore. (EOU) – Eastern Oregon University graduate Deneil Hill is returning to campus to share her current work at Binghamton University (SUNY) in New York where she is a doctoral candidate in history.

Hill’s lecture starts at 4 p.m. Wednesday, May 27 in the Pierce Library Reading Room and is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served at 3:30.

“From Senior Capstone to Ph.D. Dissertation: Researching Global Women’s Movements, Human Rights and Sexuality,” is the topic of her talk.

Hill completed a degree in history and a minor in gender studies from EOU in 2010. While describing the process of developing a Ph.D. dissertation out of an EOU senior capstone project, she will trace the historical development of the global women’s human rights movement.

Hill’s dissertation examines the ways in which activists working with the United Nations transformed legal definitions of human rights to include women’s sexual rights. Over the period of 1975-1995, global feminists moved from viewing sexuality in the context of development and population control to seeing it as a fundamental human right, demanding “women’s self-determination.”

In making claims to self-determination, women declared themselves autonomous human beings who had a human right to sexuality and bodily integrity free from violence. Such claims, which have become one dominant mode of framing sexual freedom in contemporary feminist and LGBT activism, allowed global feminists to solidify women’s sexuality and reproductive needs within existing human rights discourses.

While at Binghamton, Hill has worked as managing editor at the Journal of Women’s History and received several dissertation fellowships, including the 2015 Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in Women’s Studies and the 2014 Caroline D. Bain Scholar-in-Residence Fellowship. She also received the 2014 Joan R. Challinor Award for Distinction in the Area of Women and National Government from Schlesinger Library at Harvard University.