Electa Arenal

ELECTA ARENAL, professor emerita of Hispanic and women's studies, listed in Feminists Who Changed America, is a translator and specialist in Hispanic monastic women's culture (sixteenth-eighteenth centuries). In The Politics of Women's Studies she recounts her part in the struggles to legitimize the new field of women's studies at Richmond College (now The College of Staten Island)/CUNY where she taught from 1969-2001, with leaves as a National Endowment for the Humanities Bunting Institute Fellow at Radcliffe in Cambridge, MA (1978-80); to teach in Hawaii (1986-87); and at the University of Bergen, Norway, where she also directed their Center for Research on Women in the Humanities (1992-94). From 1997 to 2001 she directed the Center for the Study of Women and Society and coordinated the Women's Studies Certificate Program at the Graduate Center/CUNY.

Arenal and Amanda Powell have collaborated on several projects together. One of the first was on Electa's play, "This Life Within Me Won't Keep Still" (based on the life and work of Anne Bradstreet of New England and Sor Juana of New Spain). In addition to The Answer, they have worked on Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works, coauthored by Arenal and Stacey Schlau, translation by Powell. Arenal is also the author of Cultura monastica femenina and the forthcoming Neptuno alegdrico.