Summary
Jennifer Ring received her B.A. from UCLA and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. After visiting lectureships at Columbia, Stanford and UC Berkeley, she accepted an invitation to design the first Women's Studies Major and develop a full-time Women's Studies Program at the ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ. After seven years as Director of Women's Studies, she returned to teaching in the Department of Political Science.
A Political Theorist, Dr. Ring has published six books and many articles on Modern Political Theory, Identity Politics, as well as two books on Women and Baseball: Stolen Bases: Why American Girls Don't Play Baseball, University of Illinois Press, 2009; and A Game of Their Own: Voices of Contemporary Women in Baseball, University of Nebraska Press, 2015.
Her most recent books are Saving Public Higher Education: Voices from the Wasteland (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022), featuring oral history interviews with students at the University from diverse racial and economic backgrounds; and Identity Politics in the United States (Cognella, forthcoming 2025), based on the course she developed and continues to teach online at the University.
Dr. Ring retired in 2019 and lives in Berkeley, California, where she teaches political science for the University because she still enjoys the earnest brilliance of its students. She writes a Substack page titled Dispatches from the Wasteland (voicesthebook.substack.com) and posts regularly on inequality in higher education and the need to defend public higher education from America's overemphasis on elite private universities. She continues to give talks about gender and baseball at universities and professional organizations.
Specific areas of knowledge/research
Political Philosophy: Ancient, Modern and Contemporary; Identity Politics in the United States; Women, Race and American Politics; The Politics of Sports
Education
- Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 1979
- M.A., University of California, Berkeley, 1973
- B.A., UCLA, 1970