Dr. Cheri Larsen Hoeckley, professor of English and co-coordinator of gender studies at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, Calif., will explore “Men, Women, and the Stories We Tell About ‘Us’” in Bluffton University’s annual Women’s Studies Forum on March 31. Free and open to the public, her talk will begin at 11 a.m. in Founders Hall.

For nearly three decades, Larsen Hoeckley has been teaching and writing about 19th-century women’s literature. At that time, she says, love stories were called “marriage plots,” and while they were primarily for and about women, they were also “full of assumptions” about masculinity.

“When we name those assumptions and see their long cultural history,” she adds, “we start to understand how assumptions about our gendered humanness might limit our abilities to be fully human.”

Larsen Hoeckley earned her Ph.D. in English from the University of California-Berkeley in 1997—the same year she joined the Westmont faculty. Her master’s degree is also in English, with a rhetoric emphasis, from the University of Texas-Austin.