Annual Report 2021-2022
June 2022
As we arrive at the end of the academic year, we at BCRW take pride in what we have accomplished as the pandemic continues and the world offers no shortage of urgent invitations for critical social justice feminist thinking and action. BCRW’s programs, partnerships, initiatives, and collaborations continue to engage in deep interdisciplinary and intersectional work that places equal value on scholarship, activism, and the arts as modes of knowledge production and world-making. This annual report provides a window onto the depth and breadth of that work this year.
As I prepare to step down from the Directorship of BCRW, I have the opportunity to reflect on the great privilege I have enjoyed to work with so many talented and committed colleagues, students, activists, artists, and friends over these last four 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 will become Director on July 1, 2022. Professor Nadasen is an accomplished historian of feminism and social change, especially interested the social justice organizing undertaken by poor and working-class women of color. 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.
During the upcoming year, while Professor Nadasen conducts her research as a Heyman Fellow, Janet R. Jakobsen, Claire Tow Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard (and former Director of BCRW) will serve with Professor Nadasen as Co-Director. We are grateful for her willingness to step in as
Co-Director during 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 programming.
Recent events, including 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.
Elizabeth Castelli
BCRW Director (2018-2022) and Professor of Religion