“To Certain of Our Philistines”: Alain Locke and the Democratic Promise of Black Art
Can Alain Locke, the black cultural critic and public intellectual now best known for his lifelong commitment to black art and for his editorship of the 1925 anthology, The New Negro: An Interpretation, be read as a political theorist? What would it mean to engage Locke as a political theorist instead of as a cultural […]
The Window Sex Project
PROGRAM ABOUT THE PROCESS THANK YOU RESOURCES VIDEOS The Window Sex Project is a dance performance that tackles the everyday practice in which women are “window shopped,”—or forced to bear unsolicited harassment from men while walking on the street. An innovative performance grounded in personal experiences, feminist theory, and a collective need to take action, […]
The Girl Who Burned the Banknotes: Rural Women, Memory, and China’s Collective Past
What can we learn about the Chinese revolution by placing a doubly marginalized group—rural women—at the center of the inquiry? This year’s Women’s History Month lecturer, Gail Hershatter, will explore changes in the lives of women in rural Shaanxi province during the revolutionary decades of the 1950s and 1960s. Centering on the story of Zhang […]
Wiki Women’s History Month Project
Add your voice to the world’s largest source of collaboratively-curated knowledge! Wikipedia is often the first stop when people are looking to learn about a new topic, but around 85% of Wikipedia editors are men, and it’s sorely lacking in women’s history and representations. In honor of women’s history month, we’ll gather and learn how […]
Student Life During Wartime: World War II at Barnard College
Before the outbreak of World War II, Barnard’s Committee on Instruction met monthly to discuss practical academic concerns, and to debate the essential components of an undergraduate liberal arts education. But in the early 1940s the Committee’s conversations underwent a marked shift, as the Second World War increasingly intruded on the requirements and routines of […]
Private Bodies, Public Texts: A Salon in Honor of Karla FC Holloway
For the second event in BCRW’s newly inaugurated Salon Series, we have assembled a group of scholars whose expertise lies at the cross-section of law, race, gender, and bioethics to respond to Karla FC Holloway’s new book, Private Bodies, Public Texts: Race, Gender, and a Cultural Bioethics. This important and groundbreaking work examines instances where […]
The Multiple Futures of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies: The Sequel
Back by popular demand, this evening forum addresses the dilemmas and possibilities of women’s and gender studies in the contemporary corporate university, with an eye to intellectual and institutional alliances with other disciplines devoted to the study of intersectionality, such as queer studies, ethnic studies, and postcolonial studies. What are the challenges currently facing the […]
From the Front Line: Sustainability, Land Rights, Women’s Rights and Climate Change in Papua New Guinea
Rachel Sapery James is a marine scientist who is currently working as the Social and Environmental Management Systems Officer for the Bank of the South Pacific in Papua New Guinea. She will be in New York to give two presentations at the United Nations on behalf of the PNG National Council of Women. At Columbia […]
Vulnerability: The Human and the Humanities
GENERAL INFO PROGRAM PARTICIPANTS CALL FOR RESPONSES VIDEOS AND PODCASTS General Information This spring’s Scholar and Feminist Conference, “Vulnerability: The Human and the Humanities,” will explore the concept of vulnerability as a fundamental and universal characteristic of the human condition. We are vulnerable on many different levels—from our own embodiment; to our place within a […]
Backtalk/Crosstalk: The Scholar-Activist in African Gender Studies
Backtalk/Crosstalk is a new series of dialogues initiated by the Africana Studies Program at Barnard College to set members of the Africana faculty in conversation with scholars, artists and activists. Backtalk/Crosstalk keeps in mind the gains of institutional recognition for Diaspora Studies, but asks what room remains for the impertinent, insolent and disruptive work that […]
What to Eat: Science vs. Politics
Advice about diet and health is extraordinarily controversial for reasons of science and politics. Human nutritional science is difficult to conduct and interpret. Advice about what to eat affects the ability of food companies to sell products. The result is cacophony in the marketplace and unnecessary confusion about dietary matters. Will better science solve this […]
Reimagining Equality
Registration for this event is overbooked, and no additional tickets will be released. If you have already registered for the event, you must arrive before 6:25 to claim your seat. Doors open at 6:00 PM. At 6:25, any unclaimed seats will be released! If you have not registered, or are on our waitlist, we cannot […]
A Question of Methodology: Feminist Studies of Gender and the State in Contemporary Iran
Most feminist studies of post-1979 Iran focus on the legal setbacks that women encountered and their collective strategies for regaining the formal grounds they lost with the establishment of an Islamic Republic in Iran. Iranian women’s studies should not, however, only examine social movements and elite political action in its effort to decipher the post-revolutionary […]
Voices of a Women’s Health Movement
Science journalist Barbara Seaman (1935-2008) spent the last forty years of her life on the front lines as a women’s health advocate. Throughout her career, she was also a tireless supporter of other women’s voices. The recently published anthology Voices of a Women’s Health Movement, co-edited by Seaman and her long-time collaborator, Laura Eldridge, brings […]
Seeing Like a Peacebuilder: An Ethnography of International Intervention
Why do international interventions so often fail to secure a sustainable peace? Why do others succeed? To answer these questions, we need to analyze how various cultures influence non-military peacebuilders on the ground, how the various actors and functions of peace interventions interact, and how shared understandings can promote peace intervention success. Based on qualitative […]
What’s on Your Plate? The History and Politics of Food
How much do you know about the food you eat? Food production and the politics surrounding it have an enormous impact on our environment and economy. In recent years, scientists and activists have raised concerns about the sustainability and security of our food systems here in the US and around the world, but food has […]
States of Exception: Children’s Human Rights and the Humanities
This year’s McIntyre lecturer, Wendy S. Hesford, integrates critical legal studies and feminist rhetorical criticism to examine the figure of the child as a limit condition to the liberal subject of human rights law. Through her analysis of contemporary representations of children living in varied states of political exception and social exclusion—stateless children, children born […]
Mesoamerican Biodiversity, Green Imperialism, and Indigenous Women’s Leadership in Defense of Territory
The overlap between bio-diverse and indigenous geographical areas of the world has led to a new wave of territorial dispossession. This conference will explore new forms of indigenous feminism and feminist agency being forged in the current round of struggles for the protection of territory and autonomy in Mexico and other parts of the world. […]
Injured Cities, Urban Afterlives
What are the effects of catastrophe on cities, their inhabitants, and the larger world? How can we address the politics of terror with which states react to their vulnerability? This conference, convened ten years after September 11, 2001, aims to explore the effects of catastrophe and to imagine more life-affirming modes of redress and reinvention. […]
Sex, Power and Speaking Truth: Anita Hill 20 Years Later
Visit the conference website for additional information and online registration. Sex, Power and Speaking Truth: Anita Hill 20 Years Later will be held on Saturday, October 15, 2011 at Hunter College in New York City. The conference will bring together three generations to witness, respond and analyze present day realities in law, politics, the confluence […]
“Sex” is Not a Mechanism: Making “Sex-Specific Medicine” More Scientific
Since the women’s health movement blossomed in the 1970s, there has been an ever-increasing trend toward examining all aspects of human health for evidence of sex differences. But some of the movement’s major achievements—such as a federal mandate to collect and analyze data by sex in all health research—may paradoxically turn out to be obstacles […]
Preventing Violence, Promoting Justice
For registration and additional information, please visit the conference website. Sakhi for South Asian Women exists to end violence against women. They unite survivors, communities, and institutions to eradicate domestic violence, working to create strong and healthy communities. Sakhi uses an integrated approach that combines support and empowerment through service delivery, community engagement, media advocacy, […]
Julia Ward Howe’s Hippolytus: Remaking Greek Tragedy for Nineteenth-Century America
In 1857, Julia Ward Howe, poet, author of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and later a prominent social activist and feminist, wrote a new version of Hippolytus for the then famous actors Edwin Booth and Charlotte Cushman. After its Boston premiere was abruptly and mysteriously cancelled, the play was not performed until 1911 and […]
Activism and the Academy: Celebrating 40 Years of Feminist Scholarship and Action
DESCRIPTION PROGRAM MEDIA PARTNERS VIDEOS AND PODCASTS A conference in honor of the 40th anniversary of the Barnard Center for Research on Women Forty years ago, the Barnard Center for Research on Women began its mission of using research and knowledge to advance feminist scholarship and long-term partnerships with activist groups. Inspired by the new […]
Public Feelings Salon
The inaugural event in BCRW’s new Salon series, this engaged dialogue brings together several prominent and influential scholars whose work explores how affect and emotion influence public life. Just as feminism has sought to identify the ways in which the personal and the political are linked, the study of “public feelings” draws our attention to […]
Created in God’s Image: Intersections of Judaism, Gender, and Human Rights
In this year’s Rennert Forum lecture, Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster ’01 will reflect on her work as a human rights activist, mobilizing the Jewish community on campaigns against US-sponsored torture and modern slavery. Rabbi Kahn-Troster has worked tirelessly to bring about change in US foreign and domestic policy and to educate the public about the reality […]
The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film
During the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, a range of iconic female forms emerged to dominate the global pictorial landscape. Female athletes and adventurers, chorine stars, flappers, garçonnes, Modern Girls, neue Frauen, suffragettes, and trampky were all facets of the dazzling and urbane New Woman who came […]
Diversity and Disease Ecology in Plant Communities
This year’s Distinguished Women in Science lecturer, Alison G. Power, is an expert in the ways in which the diversity of hosts, vectors and pathogens influences the epidemiology of diseases in plant communities. Environmental factors are key in shaping the temporal and spatial distributions of plant viruses in natural grasslands. Field experiments show that host […]
The Labor of Care: Rethinking Gender, Work, and Rights in the American Welfare State
Once considered economically marginal, jobs in nursing, home health care, and childcare have moved to the center of the economy. In this year’s Women’s History Month lecture, Jennifer Klein ’89 will reconsider the history of the American welfare state from the perspective of care work. What will define work, rights, security, and dignity amid the […]
Violating Performance: Women, Law and the State of Exception
The 1980s was a uniquely decisive decade for feminist politics in India. Defining, delineating and legislating to prevent crimes against women became a logical and immediate goal for the women’s movement. In this lecture Shayoni Mitra looks at two women’s ensembles in Delhi—Theatre Union and Buland Natya Manch—and how they aided and enlarged the concerns […]