Dear BCRW Community,
BCRW’s Executive Committee is delighted to welcome you to a new academic year of feminist research and public scholarship that meets the political and intellectual urgencies of this moment. We’re excited to share what’s ahead for BCRW this year, but first, we want to formally introduce BCRW’s new Director, Maja Horn. Following the process in BCRW’s bylaws, Maja was nominated by the Executive Committee, received a unanimous vote from 54 members of the Advisory Board, and was appointed by Provost Walkowitz and President Rosenbury on July 1. We are deeply grateful to BCRW’s outgoing Director, Rebecca Jordan-Young, whose leadership over the past three semesters carried BCRW through an extraordinarily ambitious period of research, publication, and public programming including the exceptionally memorable 50th Scholar and Feminist conference.
We know that Maja will continue the type of impactful research represented by S&F 50, given the depth of her engagement with BCRW since her first BCRW lunchtime lecture, “Between Colonial Legacies and Global Impulses: Contemporary Queer Dominican Cultures” in 2006. She presented at the 2014 Scholar and Feminist Conference, “Locations of Learning: Transnational Feminist Practices,” has been a member of the Advisory Board since 2007, and for over a decade has been an active participant in BCRW’s Gender Justice and Neoliberal Transformations faculty research group, which resulted in the publication of the co-authored volume Paradoxes of Neoliberalism: Sex, Gender, and Possibilities for Justice (Routledge, 2022), also recently translated into Spanish.
Maja is Professor of Spanish and Latin American Cultures, currently serving as department chair, and holds a secondary appointment in Africana Studies. She is the author of Queer Genealogies in Dominican Literature and Culture (University Press of Florida, 2025) and Masculinity after Trujillo (University Press of Florida, 2014). Across her body of work, Maja engages with the Caribbean and Latin America as generative sites for theorizing questions central to feminist inquiry, an approach that closely aligns with BCRW’s longstanding commitment to transnational feminist frameworks and to centering intellectual production beyond the Global North.
Her current project, “Disability Narratives in the Americas: A Critical South-North Dialogue,” puts Latin American and U.S. personal disability narratives in comparative conversation to challenge “independence” and “inclusion” as the principal normative goals of disability advocacy. On November 10, BCRW will celebrate Maja’s Queer Genealogies in Dominican Literature and Culture with a book salon bringing her work into conversation with Rosamond S. King, Carlos U. Decena, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, and two of her former students. We are excited for this next chapter under Maja’s leadership, and we have every confidence that BCRW’s work will continue to flourish with her as Director.
In early October, we will publish a new issue of The Scholar and Feminist Online, “Counterlistenings,” edited by Gascia Ouzounian and María Zuazu. While you wait, we invite you to revisit our most recent issue, “Troubling Care”, edited by Premilla Nadasen and Alex Pittman. Extending the conversations that informed the issue, BCRW will release a video series drawn from the 2024 symposium, Care, Racial Capitalism, and Social Reproduction, later this year.
BCRW will continue—and expand upon—its “Year of AI,” begun last spring, with programming that asks how feminist inquiry can help us understand and challenge the systems of extraction, surveillance, and environmental harm that make AI possible, and imagine other ways of building and living with technology. On October 6, our annual Helen Pond McIntyre ’48 Lecture, “Surveillance Tech and the Fight for Immigrant Justice,” will bring together organizers and researchers working at the intersection of AI, surveillance, and immigrant justice.
We hope you’ll save the date for the 51st Scholar and Feminist Conference on February 27, 2027, which will ask what feminist thought and practice can help us refuse, reimagine, and build in response to AI. As we look ahead to another conference, we are still moved by the extraordinary generosity of the many members of the BCRW community who helped raise over $33,000 to make last year’s gathering possible. We hope you’ll continue to be part of sustaining this work, and we look forward to sharing much more in the months ahead.
In solidarity,
The Executive Committee of the Barnard Center for Research on Women
Elizabeth Bernstein, Professor and Chair, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Professor of Sociology, Barnard College
Sarah Haley, Director, Institute for Gender and Sexuality Studies, Associate Professor, History, Columbia University
Maja Horn, Director, Barnard Center for Research on Women, Professor of Spanish and Latin American Cultures, Barnard College
Janet Jakobsen, Claire Tow Professor, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Barnard College
Margot Kotler, Senior Associate Director, Barnard Center for Research on Women
Nara Milanich, Professor, History, Barnard College
Shayoni Mitra, Senior Lecturer, Department of Theatre, Barnard College
Manijeh Moradian, Associate Professor, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Barnard College
/// Image credit: Ritual nocturno de amor, Noa Batlle, 2024