Thursday, November 19th at 3:30PM in Temple 001 Dr. Gerise Herndon will speak on women’s leadership in rebuilding Rwanda. Dr. Gerise Herndon grew up in Springfield, MO and graduated from Drury University, majoring in English and French.  She is now a Professor of Comparative Literature and the Director of the Program in Gender Studies at Nebraska Wesleyan University where she teaches courses such as “ The US Image Abroad,” “Postcolonial and Global Literatures” (especially the Francophone literature of Africa and the Caribbean), and “Women and Social Change in Mexico.”

Earlier this year, she and a student traveled to Rwanda to study Rwanda’s development since the horrors of the 1994 genocide, focusing on the role of women in rebuilding the country’s social and political structure.   Today, women hold more than half the seats in the Rwandan Parliament and are active in social reconciliation efforts, the fight against AIDS, and progress toward economic self-sufficiency.  Dr. Herndon points out that the women’s “openness and joy is all the more remarkable when we consider that they had been abandoned and isolated after the genocide, because they were survivors of sexual assault whose entire families and homes had been stripped from them.”

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