Oral history interview with Barbara L. Simon, 2015

Biographical Note

Barbara Levy Simon has been a full-time faculty member at Columbia since 1986, having taught previously at La Salle University in Philadelphia and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. At Columbia, she serves as liaison for students in the dual-degree master's program with Union Theological Seminary. Her teaching focuses on social work advocacy, community building, and the history and sociology of human service professions. In the doctoral program, she teaches a course on the transnational history of humanitarianism. Her research interests include the history of social work, social welfare, and human service and urban professions. She applies frameworks of analysis from women and gender studies to applied professional settings and postcolonial contexts of social work practice. In 1987, Simon published Never Married Women with Temple University Press; in 1994 she published The Empowerment Tradition in American Social Work: A History with Columbia University Press

Scope and Contents

In the first session of this interview, Barbara Simon talks about her early involvement with the newly-established IRWGS upon her arrival at Columbia University in 1986. Simon talks at length about how IRWGS became a significant part of her scholarship at Columbia. At IRWGS, Simon says, she found scholars with similar ideas, gave a book talk after the publication of her first book Never Married Women, and participated in a grant-funded faculty seminar on intersectionality in feminism that continued to inform her work at the time of the interview. Simon also addresses the current state of IRWGS, applauding the institute for becoming more interdisciplinary and theoretically sophisticated, and for adding "sexuality" to its name. Simon talks about the necessity of studying both gender and sexuality. Simon discusses how she was drawn to the Columbia University School of Social Work (CSSW) and the challenges she has faced as a qualitative researcher, ethnographer, feminist scholar, activist, and an openly gay woman. Simon puts emphasis on the challenges which still remained at the time of the interview, including circumstances which make it very difficult for scholars to teach interdisciplinarily at centers like IRWGS. In the second session of this interview, Simon offers advice, imagines the possible future of IRWGS, and notes the continuing problems for feminism on Columbia's campus and elsewhere. Additionally, Simon addresses the administration's response to issues of sexual assault on campus and the relationship between IRWGS and Barnard College

Subjects

• Barnard College.
• College teachers--Interviews.
• Columbia University. Institute for Research on Women and Gender.
• Columbia University. School of Social Work.
• Feminism and higher education--United States.
• Feminist theory.
• Gay and lesbian studies--United States
• Interdisciplinary approach in education.
• Interviews.
• Juravich, Nicholas, interviewer.
• Oral histories (literary works)
• Rape in universities and colleges.
• Simon, Barbara Levy, 1949---Interviews.

Access Conditions

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