Roberta Salper

Areas of Expertise

Spanish and Caribbean Literature and Politics; Women’s Studies and Feminist Identity; Social Activism

Email: salper@brandeis.edu

Current Project

My project is to continue work on The Revolutionary Decades (1960-1980) A Testimonial.  This is a historical/literary memoir of the political development and personal formation of a progressive feminist activist/scholar immersed in the politics and culture of the United States, Spain, Cuba and Puerto Rico during 1960-1980.

Biography

After many decades of combining scholarship, academic administration and social activism,  Roberta has most recently been Executive Director of Political Research Associates, a progressive think-tank in Boston that monitors the full spectrum of the political Right.  Other academic appointments include Dean of the School of Liberal Arts at Southern New Hampshire University, Director of Humanities and Social Sciences at Pennsylvania State University-Erie and Assistant Dean of Arts and Letters, University of Pittsburgh.

Roberta was the first full-time faculty member of the first full-fledged Women’s Studies Program in the country at San Diego State in 1970, and subsequently spent five years as a Resident Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, Washington, DC.  The recipient of grants from Harvard, NEH and the Social Science Research Council, Roberta has been a member of the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association (MLA) and of the first MLA Commission on the Status of the Women in the Profession.

In addition to an early anthology (1972) and numerous articles on the Women’s Movement and the development of Women’s Studies, her areas of research and publications include gender, cultural and political analysis of the Caribbean and modern Spain.

Education

Ph.D., Harvard University

M.A., Harvard University

B.A., Boston University

Representative Publications

Salper, Roberta. “U.S. Government Surveillance and the Women’s Liberation Movement, 1968-1973: A Case Study.”  Feminist Studies 34.3 (Fall 2008): 431-55.

Salper, Roberta, ed. Female Liberation: History and Current Politics.  New York: Random House (Alfred Knopf), 1972.