By Chelsea L. McDowell
Reporter

After taking a year off from school to work at McDonald’s, gender and religious studies professor Kathleen Hanson realized she wanted more from life. Hanson is relatively new at CSU Bakersfield, and while she will not try to convert anyone to any particular religion, she wants to convert students to religious studies majors.
Hanson grew up in Bakersfield and attended Liberty High School before graduating in 2004.
Although she was raised by a secular family, her interest in religion began when she was a child.
“I was always fascinated by religion, because I felt kind of left out of it,” Hanson said. “It was something I wanted to know more about, so I took a world’s religions class my first semester of college and fell in love with it.”
She attended Bakersfield College before transferring to CSUB, where she got her bachelor’s degree in religious studies. Hanson married her husband, Nick Harl, at 22 years of age, while they were both undergraduates.
For her master’s degree, Hanson and her husband transferred to CSU Long Beach for its religious studies graduate program.
She continued her CSUB undergraduate thesis and wrote about religion and the British science fiction television show Dr. Who, for her Master’s thesis. It was that thesis that was her foray into teaching religion and popular culture, along with her gender and religious studies class.
Dr. Stephen Campagna-Pinto, who is now a colleague, was a mentor to Hanson.
“I was in the program that I now work in, so the people I work with used to be my professors, which is an interesting experience, because sometimes I still think of them, notas colleagues, but as you would
treat your professors,” said Hanson in between sips of her coffee.
Hanson was a student in several of Campagna-Pinto’s classes. He recalled her being a very engaged student.
“She was working on this particular topic and she really struggled …but eventually, she started to use some of the methods and ideas that we talked about, and she wrote a really fascinating paper that won the best essay in Arts and Humanities that year,” Campagna-Pintos said.
The biggest difference between being a professor and being a student, according to Hanson, is that students are much more able to skate by in a class, whereas a professor must always be prepared for the class.
Hanson named feminism as both her favorite and least favorite concepts to teach because of the negative stereotypes that surround the movement, which calls for equality for both sexes.
Along with being a professor and a wife, Hanson is also mother to her two-year-old son, Finnegan Lochary-Harl, who said mid-interview he “wanted to do squirrels now.”
Being a mother has made her a more understanding professor.
“Life happens to students, and I think that motherhood has made me a much more compassionate person,” Hanson said.
Senior Psychology major Celeste Barrientos was a former student of Hansons, in her women’s religions class. Barrientos remembered Hanson for being very student oriented.
“She’s not biased when she’s teaching. She’s really thorough with every explanation. She spoke about progressive and non-progressive women, and she gave good points on both ends of the spectrum,” Barrientos said.
The religious studies program at CSUB is small, but growing.
“You can go into a number of careers,” Hanson said. “If anybody ever wants to talk to me about what the heck you can do with religious studies, my office is easy to find … come visit me, I usually have candy.”