Movements: Politics, Performance, and Disability
This year’s Scholar & Feminist conference brings together feminism and disability studies, two fields that have contributed to the interrogation of the public/private divide, and when brought together, radically contest and amplify the ways in which this split has produced extremely thin understandings and practices of accessibility, participation, livelihood, visibility and integration. “Movements: Politics, Performance, […]
Intersectionality in STEM Fields: A Roadblock in Theory and Practice
Intersectionality is a concept that describes how socially constructed categories like race, class, and gender can interact on many different levels, leading to discrimination and inequality. While the notion of intersectionality has been a powerful idea to capture the multiple and complex ways that women of color have been marginalized in the academy, in the […]
Religion, Race, and Sex in the American Antislavery Mission to Jamaica
Before the Civil War, white American abolitionists established a mission in Jamaica as a “test case” for emancipation. The abolitionists struggled to reconcile their political commitment to egalitarianism with the racial and cultural hierarchies of their civilizing mission. The talk will examine this tension through the lens of a sex scandal that almost destroyed the […]
Carnivorous Virility: Becoming Dog in Pre- & Post-Modernity
In this lecture, Professor Freccero argues for a queering of temporality that would undo our nationally circumscribed and periodized fields of literary study in order to work through figures that haunt texts across historical eras. Her case study involves cynanthropy, the merger of human man and dog; it takes as its starting point the Columbian […]
Current Cravings, Strange Desires, and Frightening Things: The Effect of the Frontal Lobe and Amygdala on Affect and Actions
Dr. Elisabeth Murray’s laboratory studies the neural basis of learning, memory, emotion and action. One topic of particular interest is the neural bases of decision-making. What motivates us to make choices? How do our emotional responses lead to certain decisions over others? Examining the neural circuits critical for affective processing and the way in which […]
The Arts of Healing: The Work of Quilts in Grief
This visual presentation explores possible parallels between the process of grieving and the practice of quilt-making by focusing on a 1942 quilt from Gee’s Bend, Alabama, created by Missouri Pettway (1902-1981). Featured in the popular traveling exhibition “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend,” this 7 1/2 foot by 5 3/4 foot stained “work-clothes” quilt offers lessons […]
Intimacies Deferred: Genealogies of Freedom
Historians characterize the early nineteenth-century arrival of Chinese “coolies” to the Americas as “the transition from slavery to free labor,” in which the abolition of slavery and the introduction of indentured labor comprised the conditions for the emergence of liberal political reason, connecting the rise of bourgeois political economic institutions in Europe and North America […]
HollaBack!: Feminist Responses to Street Harassment
Street harassment, or sexual harassment in public spaces, is an issue with which just about every woman has some experience. Activists from New York City and Washington, DC will discuss new, innovative ways to combat street harassment using technology, mapping, and community organizing. Through online activism, public policy and advocacy, and outreach, these activists have […]
Christianity and the Global Politics of Sexuality
After last fall’s McIntyre lecture on the influence of Christianity on foreign policy and religious freedom in Egypt by Professor Saba Mahmood of the University of California Berkeley, we return to the topic of gender, sexuality, religion, and politics with this panel discussion. Focusing specifically on sexuality, our panelists will discuss the ways in which […]
In Quest of a Modernist Voice: Bronislava Nijinska in Post-Revolutionary Kiev
Bronislava Nijinska is the most celebrated woman choreographer of the twentieth century working in the ballet idiom. This talk will explore a pivotal moment in her development as an artist—her years in Kiev just after World War I—and the impact of the city’s multi-ethnic avant-garde on the creation of her first original works. Lynn Garafola […]
Makeshift Reclamation
A multimedia event showcasing how contemporary feminists are resisting and creating alternatives not only to gender-based oppression but also to a collapsing economic system, the climate crisis, and more. Featuring live readings, performances, and video works by artists and activists including Jessica Hoffmann, coeditor/copublisher of make/shift; Hilary Goldberg, whose new project, recLAmation, is a Super […]
A,R,+D: Architecture, Research, and the Design Process
The role of digital design and fabrication has transformed the contemporary architectural practice. This talk will look at architecture projects by Marble Fairbanks that engage these new technologies to explore new logics of design and assembly. Parallel to this research is a commitment to collaborative design processes and a belief that the collective intelligence of […]
Critical Intersections: Reproductive and Economic Justice
This conference, co-sponsored with the New York Women’s Foundation, will explore how reproductive justice and women’s economic security are inextricably linked and will highlight the work being done in these areas by 17 organizations here in New York. With the leadership predominantly of women of color and young people, these organizations focus on diverse issues […]
Activists Who Yearn for Art that Transforms: Parallels in the Black Arts and Feminist Art Movements in the United States
Through this offering of comparative cultural and intellectual history, Professor Collins exposes links between the Black Arts Movement and the Feminist Art Movement in the United States to address a critical question that is too often tackled without seeing these movements as central: How did postwar cultural workers deeply immersed in sociopolitical movements in the […]
After the Good Life, an Impasse: Notes on the Cinema of Precarity
“After the Good Life” works with two films of Laurent Cantet [Ressources humaines/Human Resources (1999) and L’Emploi du Temps/Time Out (2001)] to engage the new affective languages of the contemporary economic atmosphere across Europe: languages of anxiety, contingency, and precarity that take up the space where social democracy, upward mobility, and meritocracy used to reign. […]
Women’s History as Personal and Political: An Event in Honor of Jane S. Gould ’40
In honor of both Women’s History Month and one particular woman, Jane S. Gould ’40, first permanent director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women, we present a discussion that remembers Jane and places her life and work in the context of the feminist movements that have improved our lives in so many ways. […]
Negotiating ‘Illegality’ in New Immigrant Destinations
Conventionally, immigrant “illegality” has come to signify a status, assigned by law to migrants residing in the United States who arrive outside of authorized channels and without proper documentation. Conceptualizing illegality simply as status, however, overlooks the social consequences that this legal category has on the lives of the undocumented. In her study of Mexican […]
Reproductive Justice in Action
This panel will feature a group of reproductive justice activists and birth doulas who work across the spectrum of pregnancy, birth, and women’s health, connecting the traditional reproductive rights movement with new social justice activism that considers the complete physical, political, and economic well-being of girls and women. Birth doulas, as trained sources of physical, […]
Feminism and Climate Change
Keynote Addresses by Majora Carter and Joni Seager. Already among the most vulnerable populations worldwide, women and other marginalized groups have been the most acutely affected by the instabilities propagated by climate change. Issues such as water scarcity, drought, and other environmental problems threaten the world’s food supply, making it more difficult for disadvantaged groups […]
Erotohistoriography
Elizabeth Freeman is associate professor of English at the University of California, Davis. She specializes in American literature and gender/sexuality/queer studies, and her articles have appeared in numerous scholarly journals. Her first book was The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture, and she is the editor of Queer Temporalities, a special double […]
Quiet Revolutions: Postcolonial Women’s Writings and Structures of Solidarity
This talk offers a new reading of postcolonial women’s writings. The conventional model since the 1980s has been to emphasize issues of silence and invisibility, the desire for voice and narrative space, and self-representation as a form of empowerment and transformation. What is often eclipsed as a result is a valuable political ethic based on […]
White Rights: What Apartheid South Africa Learned from the United States
Though widely regarded as the most racist regime on earth, the apartheid government in South Africa learned from policies and practices long extant in the United States. Before apartheid was institutionalized, South African social scientists, educators and politicians were among the most astute observers of racial segregation and white supremacy in the U.S. In this […]
International Human Rights
This year’s Rennert Forum celebrates the life and work of Helen Suzman, the iconic South African leader who devoted her life to the fight against apartheid. The opening event, which coincides with the opening of an exhibition entitled “Helen Suzman: Fighter for Human Rights,” in the Diana Center, will feature world-renowned human rights activists Helen […]
Helen Suzman: Fighter for Human Rights
Helen Suzman was a member of the South African Parliament for 36 years, from 1953-1989. She was the sole opposition voice condemning apartheid during the 13-year period (1961-1974) when she was the governing body’s only member of the Progressive Party. The exhibition explores nearly four decades of Suzman’s life and vision through photographs, personal letters, […]
Grace Paley: Speaking Truth to Power
On Grace Paley’s birthday, we present a conversation exploring how imagination, truthtelling, and courageous action flow out of Paley’s life and work. A prolific writer, Paley’s fiction highlights the everyday struggles of women, what she calls “a history of everyday life.” In addition to her writing, Paley was also a committed activist, passionate about numerous […]
Indigenous Women and Zapatismo: New Horizons of Visibility
The presence of women in the ranks of contemporary Zapatismo is a feature that has become visible in various ways, and which the insurgent movement has had to integrate. Sub-commander Marcos is not making light of the issue when he states that women belong in Zapatismo not because it is a feminist movement, but because […]
Citizenship, Labor and the Biopolitics of the Bioeconomy: Recruiting Female Tissue Donors for Stem Cell Research
Catherine Waldby is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at The University of Sydney, Australia. In this presentation, Professor Waldby will explore the emerging tensions between women’s voluntary (public good) donation of reproductive tissues for stem cell research and the increasing resort to transactional forms of tissue procurement, for example […]
Should Religious Ethics Matter to Feminist Politics?
Established in 2004 in honor of Barnard alumna Helen Pond McIntyre ’48, the McIntyre lectureship highlights the work of scholars who have made extraordinary contributions to the field of Women’s Studies. In past years, the lecture series has welcomed numerous feminist icons, including legal scholar Patricia Williams; human rights advocate Dorothy Q. Thomas; feminist science […]
A Lab of One’s Own: A Place to Measure the Broken Symmetries of This Particular Elegant Universe
This year’s Roslyn Silver ’27 Science Lecture will be presented by Melissa Franklin, Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics at Harvard University. An experimental particle physicist who studies hadron collisions produced by the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, she works in a collaboration of over 600 international physicists who discovered the top quark, the most massive of known […]
The Place of Contemporary Art
In this lecture, Alexander Alberro, Virginia Bloedel Wright Associate Professor of Art History at Barnard College, explores forms of art and spectatorship that have emerged in the past two decades and are referred to as “contemporary.” The new modes are varied, covering a span from digital productions and sculptural installations that overwhelm cognition and produce […]