Brenda Bethman   Director of the UMKC Women’s Center (Ph.D., Modern German Studies / Graduate Certificate, Advanced Feminist Studies, UMass Amherst; M.A., German Literature, Temple University; B.A., German Literature, Dickinson College). Brenda has been Director of the UMKC Women’s Center since January 2007. She also teaches for the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures and the Honors Program, and serves on the UMKC Staff Council Governing Board as Secretary. Before coming to UMKC, she was founding Program Coordinator of the Women’s Center and then Director of the Women’s & Gender Equity Resource Center at Texas A&M University, where she also taught for the Women’s & Gender Studies Program, College of Liberal Arts Honors Program, and the Department of European and Classical Languages and Cultures. She is a past chair of the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) Women’s Centers Committee, as well as past Secretary for NWSA. Brenda was a member of the committee that revised the CAS Standards for Women Student Programs and Services.

Brenda has presented and published on social media, assessment, women’s leadership, women’s literature, Elfriede Jelinek, Marlene Streeruwizt, Ingeborg Bachmann, and feminism in a variety of venues. She is currently working on revising her dissertation, “Obscene Fantasies”: Generic Perversions in Elfriede Jelinek, into a book manuscript. The project examines Elfriede Jelinek’s investigation of Austria’s and Western Europe’s “obscene fantasies” through her “perversion” of generic forms in three of her best-known texts, women as lovers, The Piano Teacher, and Lust.