The UO’s Center for the Study of Women in Society is welcoming two new leaders. Law professor Michelle McKinley is the new director of the center and Dena Zaldúa starts in the newly created position of operations manager.
As the Bernard B. Kliks Associate Professor of Law at the UO School of Law, McKinley teaches immigration law and policy, public international law, international criminal law, and refugee and asylum law.
McKinley is the recipient of many research fellowships and other honors and has published widely on public international law, Latin American legal history and the law of slavery. Her book “Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600-1700,” is due out from Cambridge University Press in September 2016. She received the Surrency Prize in 2011 for her article of the same title.
McKinley also has received research fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society and the Newberry Library.
McKinley has a long association with the Center for the Study of Women in Society, beginning soon after her arrival at UO in 2007. The center supported her research with several faculty research grants, and she also participated for many years as a member of the center’s advisory board and as a coordinator or member of various research interest groups, including the Américas group and the law, culture and society group.
Zaldúa will manage the day-to-day operations at the center in the new position of operations manager. A graduate of Williams College with a bachelor’s degree in art history and women’s studies, she has worked previously in alumni relations and development for nonprofits, as a fundraising consultant and Spanish teacher, and most recently as development director at Parenting Now! in Eugene.
She worked in development for 12 years at the National Center for Lesbian Rights, where as assistant director of development she raised $4.6 million per year for the nonprofit civil rights law firm.
Zaldúa currently sits on the board of directors for the Jewish Federation of Lane County. Also, she is a member of Hispanics in Philanthropy and the Williams College Latina/o and Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Alumni Associations.