After many years of dedicated teaching, research, and service at Brigham Young University, Dr. Valerie Hegstrom (Spanish & Portuguese) is retiring this summer. Dr. Hegstrom has been the faculty coordinator of the Global Women’s Studies program for 13 years—since well before the program took that name and moved to the David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies.
Finding the Forgotten and Overlooked
The seed for Dr. Hegstrom’s involvement in women’s studies was planted during her university years. She did her undergraduate degree in English with a minor in Spanish and a master’s degree in comparative literature at BYU before heading to the University of Kansas for another master’s degree in Spanish and Latin American literature and a PhD in Spanish literature with an emphasis in theater. And in all this, she noticed a glaring omission in the scholarship surrounding her area of emphasis, Spanish literature of the 16th and 17th centuries.
“My professors were all men,” she says, “and they had told me that there were no women writers—that there was only one woman who wrote in Spanish before the end of the 19th century, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz from Mexico.” Instead of accepting this commonly held view, Dr. Hegstrom set a goal as she left grad school to begin her career: that she would include at least one woman writer in every class she taught.
Her first position was at the University of New Mexico, where she taught for four years. The first time she taught a 17th-century theater class, she set out to achieve her goal and find a female playwright other than Sor Juana. “I found an old book from 1904 that was a sort of catalog of women who wrote in Spanish from the Middle Ages through to the 19th century, and it had a few different plays. One of them was by this woman named María de Zayas, who was writing in the 17th century.”
There was one problem: there were no good editions of Zayas’ play. So Dr. Hegstrom set out to create her own for her students to use in her classes. “I got a friend to bring me a photocopy of the manuscript from the National Library, and then I transcribed it. And then I got money to go to Madrid and compare my transcription to the manuscript so I could publish an edition of the play.”
And once she’d started down that rabbit hole, she just kept going. “Once I got to the National Library in Madrid,” she explains, “I started going through the card catalog. And I would go through published catalogs of plays from Spain in the 17th and 18th centuries, page by page, and look for women's first names. I started to make a list, and the list grew.” Other academics at the time were also undertaking similar work, and Dr. Hegstrom began keeping track of all this research. From this, she says, “I launched into a career that was about the recovery of women writers who were forgotten and overlooked. I've done articles and book chapters and editions of plays and an edited book; I’ve worked on convent theater as well as theater that was performed in public playhouses, and I've worked on some poetry and novellas by women, too. So that's how I got into women’s studies.”
Women’s Studies at BYU
After the University of New Mexico, Dr. Hegstrom was hired at BYU, where she continued her work with Spanish literature and theater. For ten years, she and her husband, Dr. Dale Pratt, mentored a Spanish Golden Age theater project. “Our students performed 17th-century Spanish plays at theater festivals, universities, high schools, and elementary schools (kind of like a Shakespeare in the Schools program) throughout the Southwestern U.S., Idaho, Colorado, and Mexico,” she explains.
At BYU, she soon became a faculty affiliate of the Women’s Research Institute (WRI). The WRI was the home of the Women’s Studies minor. The minor program had been started in 1991 by Dr. Marie Cornwall (Sociology), who was then the director of the WRI. Though the minor fell under Sociology, it was housed in the WRI. But all of that changed in 2009, when the WRI was closed.
Dr. Renata Forste (Sociology) was put in charge of overseeing the transition, and she wanted to be sure the Women’s Studies minor didn’t vanish with the WRI, so she asked for volunteers from the faculty affiliates to form a committee and work on a plan for the minor. Dr. Hegstrom recalls, “The people in the meeting who raised their hands were all assistant professors without tenure. I was actually going on leave, but I looked around the room and I thought, ‘This is ridiculous. There's no associate professor in the room who's willing to help with this; it's just these non-tenured people.’ So I raised my hand.”
What followed was a year of coming up with a plan and drafting a proposal for what to do with the Women’s Studies minor. (Dr. Forste actually considered bringing the program to the Kennedy Center at the time, but that did not pan out.) In the end, in February 2011, the university administration approved the minor being housed between the Colleges of Humanities and Family, Home, & Social Sciences. The two colleges would work together to support the program.
As part of the move, Dr. Hegstrom was appointed the coordinator of the Women’s Studies program. “That was supposed to be, in 2011, a three-year appointment that could be renewed for another three years,” she says. “And everybody was very nice about saying that I was doing a good job. And so I was renewed. And then after six years, people kept asking me to just do one more year. So I kept saying, ‘Okay, I'll do one more year, I’ll do one more year; okay, this time it's just one more year.’ And then the COVID-19 pandemic happened. There was always a reason for me to keep doing it.” All in all, Dr. Hegstrom was coordinator of the program from 2011 to her retirement in 2024—a total of 13 years.
Women’s Studies Goes Global
In the middle of this lengthy tenure, a major change came to the Women’s Studies program. At the beginning of 2017, Dr. Forste became director of the Kennedy Center and revived the idea of bringing the program there. She reached out to Dr. Hegstrom to see if she was interested in moving Women’s Studies to the Kennedy Center and renaming it Global Women’s Studies.
Dr. Hegstrom was hesitant at first, as things were going well as they were and the move to the Kennedy Center would require a lot of work. But after discussion with Dr. Forste and with the Women’s Studies executive committee, the decision was finally made to make the change. Drs. Forste and Hegstrom created a proposal that was approved in 2017; it opened the door not only for the creation of the Global Women’s Studies minor, but also the potential future creation of a major.
Despite her initial hesitation, Dr. Hegstrom has been very happy with the move. “We love being in the Kennedy Center,” she says. “I had no idea, when we were moving over, how great it would be for Global Women’s Studies to be in the Kennedy Center. I mean, it's just the best place and we have so much support and we love all the other programs and we love all the people. It's just a great place to work, and it has been terrific for Global Women’s Studies to be here.”
An Ever-broadening Program
In its early days, the Women’s Studies program was, by virtue of being part of the Sociology department, heavily skewed toward the social sciences. Dr. Hegstrom recalls that in the early 2000s, other than a public health class and an English class, everything else was social sciences. That was one thing she set out to change when she became coordinator.
“We've doubled the number of faculty affiliates,” she says. “And I've loved working with them and getting to know them from across campus and trying to listen to what they thought would be valuable and what they thought they could contribute and what they could imagine in terms of what would be valuable courses about women and gender.” The minor now includes classes from areas as varied as communications, art history, philosophy, religion, science, and languages.
One aspect of the program that Dr. Hegstrom loves is the Colloquium course. Each fall and winter semester, the program holds its GWS Colloquium lecture series, which brings in scholars from across campus and around the world to talk about research related to women and gender. The class (in which students attend the lecture series) has been an elective for many years, but is now considered such an important part of the GWS experience that students are required to take it twice. Dr. Hegstrom explains, “A lot of times, students will come in who are, say, a sociology major or an English major, and they see women's studies through their own lens. So when they come into Colloquium and they have this series of lectures that they have to hear, all of a sudden, their mind is blown because they're realizing, ‘You can do women's studies in these other fields too’—things they never imagined. One time, one of our speakers talked about artificial intelligence and whether or not it could be gendered, and the sociology students were saying, ‘I had no idea that computer science and artificial intelligence could involve gender.’ It was completely new to them to think about these other fields.”
The student experience has always been an important focus for Dr. Hegstrom. “I love Global Women’s Studies students,” she says. “I think they are the students at BYU who are most likely to make the world a better place. So I’ve tried really hard to help them know how to do the things that they're trying to accomplish.” In 2012, she oversaw the creation of the Women’s Studies Honor Society (now the Global Women’s Studies Honor Society). She also oversaw the creation of the GWS-oriented study abroad program, Human Rights, Women's Rights. “We love that program,” she says. “Every time we've been able to send students, the students have loved it. It's a really great group of students every time because they're so committed to the idea of human rights and women's rights and to being in places where they can meet with people who are working to improve human rights in the world. So it doesn't turn into a program that's just about getting out of Provo and being able to travel; it's a program where the students are working really hard and they're all passionate about it.”
A more recent addition to Global Women’s Studies is the Brandie Siegfried lectureship and scholarship, named for Dr. Brandie Siegfried (English), who played a vital role in the Global Women’s Studies program for many years and regularly taught the Global Women’s Studies Theory class. She passed away in 2021 after a struggle with cancer. “We're really proud that we can honor our colleague who we lost by having the annual lecture and scholarship,” says Dr. Hegstrom. “We think it's a big deal. We're also really grateful that we have a good endowment and we're able to help one of our GWS minors every year with substantial financial support. We look for a student who has some kind of financial struggle but who's also committed to making the world a better place for women through their research or their creative work.”
Dr. Hegstrom defines women’s studies as “everything that the rest of the university does, except from a women's perspective. It’s all of what we learn at the university, all knowledge, but focused through a woman's lens so that we don't just read the world masculinely.” This perspective, she says, is vital. “If it were possible, I would want every student on campus to take an Intro to Global Women's Studies class. The things we get to teach in that class would help them in their own lives and in their associations with other people at work, at church, at home, and in building up their communities in positive ways, because they’d become more sensitive to the needs and perspectives of other people.”
She’s loved how Global Women’s Studies has become “a space on campus—and we actually have a physical space on campus, because of the Kennedy Center—where faculty and students can feel like they belong. Sometimes students don't feel like they belong in other places, and so they can find their way here.”
A Career Spent Studying Women
After a long career, Dr. Hegstrom is retiring in the summer of 2024—though she intends to stay busy even after retirement. She is the president-elect of the Association for Hispanic Classical Theater. Additionally, she has a major project she’s still working on: “Dr. Anna-Lisa Halling and I (along with our colleague from digital humanities, Dr. Jeremy Browne) will continue our work on building the website More Than Muses. The website is a digital library of biographies and bibliographies about and texts by Iberian women writers from the Middle Ages through the 19th century.” Read more about this significant project in this article from the College of Humanities.
For Dr. Hegstrom, studying women has made for a remarkable career, and it has helped her find a professional community. “At BYU, we don't have a high percentage of women faculty, compared to other universities across the country. And it can get lonely sometimes, because you don't have that same sort of support network. So it has been, for me, such a great experience to be able to work with other women across campus who are also thinking about women and gender in their research, and to work with my male colleagues who are thinking about women and gender and equality and race and ethnicity and class and all of the other kinds of intersectional things that that affect people's lives in positive and negative ways.”
She concludes, “It's been such a great experience for me to work with such great people and with such great students, and to work in the Kennedy Center where the people are just so friendly and kind. It has been the highlight of my career to be the coordinator of Global Women’s Studies. I will be grateful forever for that.”