Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies turns fifty this year and to commemorate this important milestone, the Frontiers editorial collective at the University of Utah produced a 50th anniversary Oral History Project.
Conceived in 2019, the project’s goal was to gather and archive oral history interviews with past Journal editors, editorial assistants, board members, and those affiliated with the Journal during its long history. The “Frontiers at 50 Oral History Project” seeks to build upon Patrice McDermott’s study, Politics and Scholarship: Feminist Academic Journals and the Production of Knowledge, which features a chapter on Frontiers based on interviews with founding collective members, as well as the Journal’s prior decade’s celebration, an article titled “Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies Turns Forty! Reflections from Former Editors.”
Led by co-editor Kimberly Jew, the editorial collective at the University of Utah secured a University research grant to fund the project. Elizabeth C. Silva, a University of Utah PhD student at the time, was hired to conduct the interviews. Based on questions developed by the co-editors, Silva interviewed 15 participants via Zoom during the months of February and March 2021. Over the next several years, the editorial collective, including Elise Homan (an editorial assistant and University of Utah PhD student at the time), engaged in a multi-layered process of transcription, writing summaries, editing, and preparing the final transcripts and audio files for transfer to two archives.
The oral histories are now housed at the University of California at Berkeley Bancroft Library (official Frontiers archives) and the University of Utah Marriott Library (partial online holdings). Both archives are accessible for research endeavors.
The Frontiers at 50 Oral History Project offers a rich and unique archival resource – it stands as a record of the history of the Journal told entirely through the recollections and perspectives of its former editorial members. As “Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies Turns Forty!” notes, oral histories carry a special resonance with the guiding feminist values of centering women’s stories, voices, and diverse experiences.[1]
This special Frontiers online issue presents an assemblage of women’s editorial perspectives and memories, offering an overview of the Frontiers at 50 Oral History Project that we hope will pique readers’ interest and lead them to the interviews for deeper study. This digital issue provides a brief introduction to the Journal’s identity and history, with a summary of the key themes that emerge from the oral histories. The rest of the issue features nine narrators, including biographical descriptions and a sampling of selected quotes from their interviews.
Frontiers’ History and Identity
Frontiers began in 1974. It was buoyed by a local movement among students, faculty, and community members to develop a Women’s Studies program at the University of Colorado-Boulder. A small group of professors, graduate students, and non-academics from the program established the Journal as a volunteer-based, grassroots organization. Although the Journal was housed at the University of Colorado-Boulder, it did not have an official affiliation with this institution.
The founding members formed an “editorial collective” and published their first issue in 1975. Based on a consensus model with an inclusive vision, the editorial collective sought to bridge academic and community-based feminist knowledge through publishing readable and substantive articles and creative works that emphasized the significance of women across a range of social differences. Specific attention was paid to women of the American west, a direction that both strengthened the Journal’s early identity and hemmed it in as a “local” or regional journal.[2] An editorial board was also created, one which included several community members who helped review essays.
As Patrice McDermott observes in Politics and Scholarship, Frontiers established itself as unique from Feminist Studies and Signs with its dedication to the blurring of lines, both in terms of the work it published and an egalitarian vision of editorial leadership. She writes, “Although this blurring of styles and genres distinguished Frontiers’ community orientation from other more academically oriented journals, the editors believed that the collective structure and process of the editorial board was their most radical departure from other traditional structures.”[3]
The editorial collective remained at the University of Colorado-Boulder (UCB) until it transitioned to the University of New Mexico (UNM) in 1991. The Journal continued to move institutions every 5-8 years: to Washington State University (WSU) in 1997, Arizona State University (ASU) in 2003, Ohio State University (OSU) in 2012, and to its current home at the University of Utah (U of U) in 2017.
The narrators of the 50th anniversary oral histories include several founding members of the Journal: Kathi George and Elizabeth (Betsy) Jameson, as well as others associated with the Journal’s first years in Colorado: Susan Juhasz, Kathy Kaiser, and Sherna Berger-Gluck. The rest of the interviews span the Journal’s past locations: Claudia Isaac and Louise Lamphere at UNM; Sue Armitage at WSU; Susan Gray at ASU; Judy Wu, Guisela Latorre, Mytheli Sreenivas, Margaret Solic, and Krista Benson at OSU.
Having Their Say: Editors as Storytellers
The interviews provide detailed perspectives into the practical, working aspects of academic feminist publishing. Often, the narrators emphasize their concern with the Journal’s basic survival regarding funding, time constraints, and editorial labor. This concern emerged with the first editorial team and led to Kathi George assuming the role of managing editor and head copy editor. The reorganization of the collective, with one person leading the Journal’s logistics and daily operation, was seen as a necessity. Gradually, George embraced the business, subscription, printing, and distribution duties. Her oral history interview details the heightened labor involved in holding the Journal together in this way, which she continued to do for over a decade.
In the early 1990s, George explored the opportunity of housing the Journal in the Women’s Studies Program (directed by Betsy Jameson) at the University of New Mexico. In this transition, Frontiers became officially incorporated into a university, a process that was necessary for funding and resources. Because the Journal’s institutionalization occurred alongside the broader formation of Women’s Studies during the 1970s and 1980s, the Journal not only gained financial and editorial stability but the work for the Journal was now institutionally recognized.
In short, as the field of Women’s Studies became legitimized, it added more respect and credibility to Frontiers’ efforts – and in turn, Frontiers, along with other feminist academic journals, helped to legitimize the field at large.
The Journal has remained part of university departments since this time, and it was eventually absorbed under the auspices of the University of Nebraska Press for contractual, publication, and distribution support. Partnering with a university press proved a game changer in terms of the Journal’s publication profile. As the several Arizona State University co-editors acknowledge, the Press even urged the production of book-like readers, compilations of past Journal publications focused on emerging fields of scholarship, a shift that expanded the scholarly impact of the Journal.[4]
This gradual evolution of Frontiers into a primarily academic publication ensured its survival but it also challenged the original vision of the Journal as a bridge between academic and mainstream feminist circles. The Journal’s academic trajectory strained its connections to community women and grassroots, popular feminisms. At times, editors struggled to balance the practical work of the editorial collective model with their own professional academic endeavors. In addition, the Journal shifted steadily toward more specialized and theory-oriented work, reflecting broader changes in humanities and scholarly discourses. Several narrators report increasing divisions between scholars and the community – and among academic women as well, even among Journal editors.
Despite changes and constraints, the editorial teams remained committed to the central tenets of the original mission of the Journal and sought to reimagine them. The Frontiers at 50 Oral History Project illuminates how the editors enacted a feminist politics of collaboration and connectivity, including:
- approaching editorial work as research and pedagogy
- focusing on the mentorship of emerging scholars and their writing
- creating space for women’s community within its pages
- engaging in public activities for the field, such as the Transnational Feminist Summer Institute hosted by The Ohio State University in 2014
- embracing the generative notions of “frontiers” (regional and innovative)
As previously mentioned, women’s oral history emerged as key to this type of feminist research that would be useful to readers outside of the university and tied to grassroots knowledge production. Early editors speak often of their “pioneering” oral history work in their interviews. The tradition of publishing issues in a multi-genre format, and cultivating experimental academic, creative, and collaborative writing, including works in multiple languages, has continued to flourish.
Furthermore, the narrators also discuss efforts to retain several community-focused elements in the Journal. From the first issue, Frontiers published literary pieces, artwork, interviews, roundtables, and essays employing hybrid academic-popular forms. The founding collective also sought the work of non-academic authors and artists and pursued scholarly studies that were closely tied to community women.
Finally, the Journal is notable for its commitment to diversity. During the Journal’s years at the University of Colorado, it published significant work on U.S. women of color and immigrant women, including seminal special issues on indigenous, Chicana, Asian American, and lesbian women. Across the oral histories, the narrators reiterate their editorial focus on attending to the diversity of women and how they contributed to emerging developments in the fields of intersectionality, coloniality, and transnationalism.
As this brief introduction highlights, these oral histories provide not only a narrative of the Journal’s unique history but of the past 50 years of feminist and women’s centered scholarship, community, and activism. This online issue offers a first look at these interviews as a preview to the many other stories that can now be found in the Frontiers archives.
Selected Narrators
(in order of Journal home)
University of Colorado at Boulder — 1974-1991
Kathi George
Kathy Kaiser
University of New Mexico — 1991-1997
Claudia Isaac
Elizabeth (Betsy) Jameson
Washington State University — 1997-2003
Susan Armitage
Arizona State University — 2003 – 2012
Ohio State University — 2012–2017
Krista Benson
Guisela Latorre
Mytheli Sreenivas
Judy Tzu-Chun Wu
These nine oral histories – and the others – are housed at the following Frontiers archives locations:
UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library:
Frontiers records, 1972-2012. Available at Northern Regional Library Facility Bancroft (NRLF) (BANC MSS 2004/237 z)
University of Utah, J. Willard Marriott Library:
ACCN3283 Frontiers A Journal of Women Studies Oral History Collection
Special Collections
Author Biographies
Kimberly M. Jew is Associate Professor of Theatre and Ethnic Studies at the University of Utah. Her areas of teaching and research include modern and contemporary drama with emphases in ethnic and Asian American theatres and Asian diasporic theatres. Her works have recently been published in Pacific Coast Philology, Routledge Companion to Absurdist Literature, and Theatre and Performance Notes and Counternotes. She is currently co-editing a volume on women’s leadership in the performing arts for the 4-part series Women’s Innovations in Theatre, Dance, and Performance (Bloomsbury Press, 2026). At the U of U, she has served as a co-editor and guest editor for Frontiers, a Journal of Women Studies, Area Head for the Theatre Teaching BFA program, Instructional Leader and Co-leader for the Diversity Scholars program, and interim Chair for the Division of Ethnic Studies. She will be directing Lauren Yee’s The Hatmaker’s Wife at Westminster University in Fall term 2025.
Elise Homan completed her Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Utah. Her research examines the intersections of technology and media with contemporary activism and political movements with a concentration on cross-border and transnational contexts. Her work has appeared in Women’s Studies in Communication, Lateral, and the edited collection Unsettling Intercultural Communication (Peter Lang, 2024). She is the Managing Editor for Frontiers as well as for Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research journal, an academic environmental science journal housed at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
Elizabeth C. Silva has worked in racial, gender and class equity movements for over 20 years; trained in interdisciplinary research, and intersubjective analysis. Elizabeth C. Silva, LLC (ECS) is dedicated to the depth of experience needed when working in a variety of roles in higher education, P-12 schools, not for profit, government and independent research. ECS specializes in collaborative cross-sector approaches, and multidisciplinary methods, to leverage partnerships for complex social solutions. Centering relationality, lived experience, and best practices in program development—ECS brings a rare skill set to facilitation and development built around critical literacies and social awareness. Centering relationality, lived-experience as best practices in program development; ECS brings a rare skill set to project management and development built around social awareness. ECS spearheads innovative work positioning communities most impacted as central to developing non-traditional approaches to shared power and community lead collaborative action. Elizabeth holds a PhD in Education Culture and Society (University of Utah), a MA in Language Literacy Sociocultural Studies (University of New Mexico) and a BA in Sociology and Spanish with a minor in Psychology (University of New Mexico). She is a founding sister of Young Women United (currently Bold Futures NM) and has participated in countless social justice; community based organizing work, and government program development.
Notes
[1] Kathi George, Alanna Preussner, Elizabeth Jameson, Louise Lamphere, Jane Slaughter, Sue Armitage, Patricia Hart, et al., “Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies Turns Forty! Reflections from Former Editors,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 36, no. 2 (2015): 212.
[2] Patrice McDermott, Politics and Scholarship: Feminist Academic Journals and the Production of Knowledge (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 91.
[3] McDermott, Politics and Scholarship, 89.
[4] George et al., “Frontiers: a Women Studies Journal Turns Forty!,” 205.