Susan F. Feiner is a research scholar at the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity. She was the first PhD qualified economist to be hired into a women and gender studies program. She was also the first PhD economist to earn both tenure and full professor status in women’s studies and economics. An internationally acknowledged expert in feminist economics, Feiner’s 2004 volume Liberating Economics: Feminist Perspectives on Families, Work and Globalization won the American Library Association’s designation as an “Outstanding Academic Title”. In addition to her dozens of publications and presentations, Feiner’s innovative grant writing secured nearly two million dollars for faculty/curriculum development projects aimed at, among other things, upending the myths of “homo-economics” through alternative approaches to economics education.
Beginning in the late 1980s the Ford, Rockefeller and National Science Foundations supported her pioneering work on race and gender bias in economics education.The final three grants of her career are especially noteworthy. Feiner secured grant monies from USAID to support the formation of a Gulf Region Women Studies Consortium which hosted the inaugural International Women’s History Celebration conference in the Arab world (March 2012, Sharjah UAE). She also designed and found funding for a project to cross-fertilize feminist approaches to policy and education across North Atlantic Nations including the US, Iceland, UK, Denmark, and Canada. And finally, as outgoing president of her faculty union she secured a $700,000 grant from the National Education Association for developing and implementing Social Justice Education across Maine’s public universities, community colleges, and K-12 schools. This grant was quashed and the monies returned after the University of Maine Board of Trustees (a wholly owned subsidiary of the Maine GOP—including Senator Collins’ older brother Sam as chair, the 2018 GOP gubernatorial candidate for Governor Shawn Moody, with the rest of the members handpicked by then Governor Paul LePlague) falsely accused Feiner of misusing public funds. The BoT barred Feiner from teaching at any of the UMaine campuses following her offer of a social justice course on sexual assault and the SCOTUS nomination of Brent Kavanaugh. Feiner is proud to be Maine’s “Rogue Professor” the moniker coined by University administrators. The foregoing are the qualities and accomplishments that led to Feiner’s recognition as one of three 2018-19 Mary Ann Hartmann awardees.
