The Women's Resource Center exudes a certain casual, unpretentious atmosphere where women feel free to walk around barefoot and to bring their lives to the forefront of discussion. And the Center's new director is no exception to the rule.
"I'm an administrator, an organizer, a literary critic, a good cook, a gardener, and, I'm addicted to step aerobics," said Giavanna Munafo as she leaned back on the couch in the Center and put her feet up.
Munafo began her directorship Sept. 1 of this year. She was selected this summer from a nationwide search.
Although she is still in the process of familiarizing herself to the College, she has goals and visions for the Center set.
She said the Center provides a space in which "women can meet and discuss their needs." But Munafo said she sees the purpose of the Center as going beyond a meeting place and a form of support for the education of the campus about women's issues.
"I think the WRC can also serve as a kind of monitoring environment for women," she said. "We're hooked into a lot of places on campus."
She said her favorite part of being at the College is the people.
"The students I've met so far have been great," she said.
"I'm really excited about working with the women's studies faculty," she said, pausing briefly. "They're a brilliant, congenial and savvy group of people," she said.
Munafo said she became interested in women's issues when she took women's studies as an undergraduate.
"That was my Ah-Ha experience," she said.
"I had an amazing trail blazing professor who was the director of the women's center and a lot of my feminist consciousness came from her," she said.
Munafo grew up in Baltimore, Md. and went to the University of Virginia where she received her Bachelor of Arts degree in English in 1983. She received her Master of Fine Arts degree in poetry from the University of Iowa in 1985.
Since then, she has held administrative and teaching positions as part of the women's center at the University of Virginia.
Munafo is now working on her doctoral thesis titled "The properties of Whiteness: Contemporary American Women Novelists and the Figuring of Racial Identity."
"I do a lot of work on race and ethnicity and that will be involved in some of the work we do at the Women's Resource Center," she said.
Munafo and her husband of four-and-a-half years have two "adorable" dogs. They are still in the process of moving in and have been trying to find a sofa in most of their spare time these days.
Her spare time spent outside of sofa shopping includes hiking, bike riding and kayaking.
"I try to cook at least one good real meal on the weekend," she said. "I tend to cook a lot of Italian food but I cook all kinds of stuff."
She said her main goal for the immediate future is to learn more about the College.
"I'm already working on learning how things work," she said. "Because of that, I'm trying to refrain from trying to initiate a lot of new efforts until I feel I have a pretty good handle on what works."
After she gets an idea of how the College works, she said she will try to start a brown bag lunch discussion series on women's health using people from health services and from the community.
In the Fall of 1995, she plans to organize a series on diversity issues at Dartmouth "to involve students, faculty and staff ... in recognizing and accepting differences," she said.
She said she will consider herself successful "if I never run into another person at Dartmouth who asks who we are, where we are and what we do."
She said "when the WRC no longer needs to scramble for funding to produce important educational and cultural programs," she will also feel like she has reached her goals.
She said 10 years from now she sees herself in either a teaching or administrative position that involves women's issues.
"I would hope that I would still be involved in organizing for change," she said. "I think I will always be involved in providing support for women and I hope to be teaching."
"I don't think I would be appropriate to be in this position for 10 years," she continued. "But I might still be at Dartmouth."
