Gwendolyn Gillson

My identity as an academic is grounded in my dedication to the support of others, including my interlocutors, fellow academics, and students. Grounded in the feminist values of care and respect, my teaching, research, and service revolve around helping others recognize and build their strengths to help them develop into the people they wish to be. These three areas are co-extensive in my identity as a scholar and each area strengthens and encourages development in others.

My teaching centers on recognizing the humanity in all people, especially those considered “other.” Grounded in the feminist concept of intersectionality, my teaching is driven by the idea that much of global, local, and interpersonal strife comes from an inability to imagine others, whoever those others may be, as complex humans. This focus on mutual humanity extends to a recognition that students learn in a variety of ways and a dedication to giving students the tools to recognize their own effective learning strategies to enable them to become co-learners. In addition, I strive to develop students’ information literacy to enable them to independently discover and critically analyze numerous types of information. (Please see my Teaching Statement for a further elaboration of my teaching).

My research is about challenging the “traditional” narratives present in both scholarship and society. Drawing on transnational feminism, affect theory, and lived religion, my scholarship, like my teaching, looks at “others,” however they are defined, within larger social power structures and attempts to recover and ultimately highlight their experiences and ways of being. In Japan, I work with Japanese Buddhist women who have been largely sidelined in both religious institutions and scholarship about Buddhism. My work challenges the narrative that women have been less actively involved in living and interpreting Buddhism. Instead, I propose that women have always been deeply embedded in Buddhist practice and experience, but their engagement has not been recognized because it does not look or feel the same as men’s experiences of Buddhism. Drawing on ethnography, my research explores the ways religion feels, how it helps women craft meaningful relationships with each other, and how gendered labor cultivates gendered bodies within religious spaces.

My service focuses on ways that can help both faculty and students develop their personal and professional identities. Indeed, the extent of my service attests to my understanding of the importance of service to my own professional identity. My work as the editor of Body and Religion, and the co-chair of the associated American Academy of Religion Body and Religion Unit, I have worked to include voices of younger scholars and encouraging discussions across religious boundaries. As the Academic Director of the First Year Seminar Program, I transformed the Common Read program to be more inclusive of lower-income and international students while simultaneously supporting faculty throughout the year with professional development workshops on effective teaching and advising. Further, I have run the Asian Studies program at Illinois College since my arrival in 2019, taken two groups of students for short study-abroad trips to Japan, and have successfully integrated Asian Studies across the curriculum through workshops and advocacy for the program. Every service endeavor I undertake is chosen based on its ability to help me help others and the fruits of that labor are evident through the enriched lives of my students and colleagues.