Oral history interview with Victoria P. Rosner, 2015

Biographical Note

Victoria Rosner is a Senior Associate Dean at Columbia University's School of General Studies. She works with the Postbaccalaureate, pre-med program at GS and also works as an academic affairs coordinator. In addition to her administrative duties, Rosner also serves as an Adjunct Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and she has taught courses in IRWGS. Rosner's research focuses on twentieth-century British literature, especially modernism, gender studies, and life writing. Her work has consistently had feminist and interdisciplinary aspects, with special attention to architecture, design, and material culture. Rosner's first book, Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life, won the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize. She also recently published an edited collection with Geraldine Pratt titled The Global and the Intimate: Feminist Theory in Our Time in 2012. Rosner first came to Columbia as an undergraduate, and she received her B.A. in Comparative Literature in 1990. She also earned her PhD in English Literature at Columbia in 1999. She then taught in the English department at Texas A and M University, where she received tenure. She returned to Columbia as a visiting professor in 2008, and went on to take the dean position in 2010

Scope and Contents

Victoria Rosner begins this interview by discussing her undergraduate years as a member of one of the first co-ed graduating classes at Columbia University. She addresses the underrepresentation of female professors and their experience both in the classroom and as employees of the University. As a graduate student of English Literature at Columbia she encountered more female professors and developed a close relationship with her advisor Carolyn Heilbrun, who resigned shortly after in response to the decision not to tenure Susan Winnett. Rosner addresses both the exciting and destabilizing nature of being a student at this time. Upon reading Nancy K. Miller's book Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts, Rosner developed a relationship with Miller as well as Columbia Professor Jean Howard. Rosner explains how these connections led her to adopt an interdisciplinary and feminist approach to her scholarship. Rosner discusses her time at Texas A and M University and her later return to Columbia University and transition into the administration. There, Rosner became involved with IRWGS after holding the conference "Writing a Feminist's Life: The Legacy of Carolyn G. Heilbrun" and went on to participate in shaping IRWGS's curriculum. Rosner discusses the growing acceptance of feminist scholarship and the importance of maintaining IRWGS as a separate, but collaborative and interdisciplinary entity

Subjects

• College administrators--Interviews.
• College teachers--Interviews.
• Columbia University--Interviews--Alumni and alumnae.
• Columbia University. Institute for Research on Women and Gender.
• Feminism and higher education--United States.
• Feminist theory.
• Freeman, Mary T., interviewer.
• Heilbrun, Carolyn G., 1926-2003.
• Interdisciplinary approach in education.
• Interviews.
• Oral histories (literary works)
• Rosner, Victoria--Interviews.
• Texas A & M University.

Access Conditions

Copyright by the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York, 2015