HWS News
13 September 2022 Bayer Named William R. Kenan Jr. Chair
Professor of Women’s Studies Betty M. Bayer, who holds the William R. Kenan Jr. Chair, works at the intersection of feminist history and psychology.
In recognition of her significant scholarship, service to the HWS community and excellence in teaching, Professor of Women’s Studies Betty M. Bayer has been named the William R. Kenan Jr. Chair.
“I am honored to be named William R. Kenan Jr. Chair,” says Bayer, who was awarded the endowed professorship beginning July 1. “This professorship recognizes my interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching while providing much valued support to continue research in support of that scholarship, including travel to archives — ones I have been waiting to go to since the pandemic began.”
Created and supported through the generosity of numerous alums and friends, endowed professorships underwrite the work of faculty in recognition of exceptional teaching and research. The funding supports increased opportunities and resources for scholarship and academic initiatives.
“Betty is a remarkable educator and formidable scholar. She inspires students in the classroom, brings creativity and depth to her interdisciplinary research, and has broadened the Colleges’ social and intellectual outlook to engage with the world more fully,” says Professor of Economics Joyce P. Jacobsen, who, as President of HWS, appointed Bayer to the Kenan Chair.
An internationally recognized scholar, Bayer is at work on a history of cognitive dissonance, as introduced in the landmark 1950s social psychology book When Prophecy Fails. Her history of this book and its undercover study of a small millennialist group tacks back and forth in time, drawing on relevant larger histories of cognitive dissonance with their concomitant cosmic questioning of worlds, some seemingly at odds with one another. What this history unfolds is less psychology’s capacity to reveal the mysteries of the psyche than the field’s forte for revolutionizing the very ways we see ourselves as rational subjects, beyond mystery. Publications related to this project include her chapter “Images of ‘man’ – One revolution around another (in roughly forty winks)” and “Wonder in a world of struggle.”
A member of the HWS faculty since 1992, Bayer served as the chair of the Women’s Studies Program for more than a decade, was co-founder of LGBTQ studies, and from 2002 to 2009, directed what is now the Fisher Center for the Study of Gender and Justice. She received the HWS Faculty Teaching Award in 2004 and the Community Service Award in 2009.
Bayer is co-editor of the widely cited books Reconstructing the Psychological Subject and Challenges to Theoretical Psychology. She has served on the editorial boards of the journals International Journal of Critical Psychology, Theory & Psychology, The History of Psychology and Psychology and Sexuality, and on the advisory boards of Psychology of Women, British Psychological Society and Irish Feminist Review.
From 2017 to 2019, Bayer served as president of the board of directors of the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, N.Y. She was senior fellow at the prestigious Martin Marty Center for the Study of Religion at the University of Chicago from 2013 to 2015.
Listen to an interview with Bayer on the Pulteney Street Podcast.
