Farewell from Elizabeth Castelli, Director, 2018-2022
Dear Friends of BCRW,
As many of you already know, I concluded my service as Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women on June 30. I became Interim Director of the Center in July 2018, and then served another three years as Director beginning in 2019. It has been a great privilege to work with so many talented and committed colleagues, students, activists, artists, and friends over these last few years as we have built on BCRW’s fifty years of feminist scholarship and activism aimed at creating a more just and equitable world in which all can thrive.
The work of BCRW will continue and flourish under the able leadership of Premilla Nadasen, Claire Tow Professor of History at Barnard, who became Director on July 1. Professor Nadesen is an accomplished historian of feminism and social change, and she is especially interested in how poor and working-class women of color have organized for social justice. She is the author of several books, most recently Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women who Built a Movement, published by Beacon in 2015. She is currently working on a biography of Miriam Makeba, and she will be a Senior Faculty Fellow at the Society of Fellows/Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia in 2022-2023. She is a past president of the National Women’s Studies Association, and the winner of the 2020 Ann Snitow Prize for outstanding feminist activist and intellectual work–among numerous other awards.
For the 2022-2023 academic year, Janet R. Jakobsen, Claire Tow Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard (and former Director of BCRW) will serve as Co-Director alongside Premilla Nadasen. We are grateful for her willingness to step in as Co-Director for this transitional year, and look forward to celebrating the publication of her new book (coedited with Elizabeth Bernstein, Professor of Sociology and WGSS at Barnard), Paradoxes of Neoliberalism: Sex, Gender, and Possibilities for Justice–itself the culmination of a BCRW-sponsored working group–in our fall line-up of programming.
Recent events, including but not limited to the cataclysmic overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court earlier this month, remind us all of the ongoing urgency of the social justice feminist intellectual and activist work BCRW performs and supports. It has been an honor to be part of this important organization throughout my time at Barnard and in the last several years as Director. As I return to full-time teaching and research in the Religion department at Barnard, I look forward to BCRW’s next chapter with confidence in and enthusiasm for the Center’s new leadership.
Finally, I would like to express my deep and abiding gratitude to all of the staff of BCRW–Miriam Neptune, Hope Dector, Avi Cummings, Pam Phillips, and Sophie Kreitzberg–as well as the many student research assistants who have worked with us over the last few years. BCRW is a collective enterprise, and it would not exist without the talents, creativity, and deep commitment of all of these people.
Warm regards,
