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2006-2007 Events

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January

• Gender Breakfast, Friday, January 26, 9:15-11:15am, 754 Schermerhorn Extension:
• Carol Sanger, Barbara Aronstein Black Professor of Law, Columbia University, "Developing Markets in Baby~Making: In the Matter of Baby M"
• Carol Sanger is the Barbara Aronstein Black Professor of Law at Columbia’s Law School. Her research centers on regulation of maternal conduct, minors and abortion, and law's relation to culture. At this breakfast, Sanger will lead a discussion on what might well be termed the custody trial of the century: the case of Baby M.
• This case set the stage for debates about the commoditization of children, women’s reproductive autonomy, and the meaning of family in an era of technological possibilities. Sanger asks how it was that two couples, strangers to one another with nothing in common but complementary desires, were able to connect and reach a deal regarding the most intimate of arrangements: insemination, pregnancy, and parenthood. In other words, how did a market for baby-making get going in New Jersey in the mid-1980s?
• The article “Developing Markets” can be downloaded by click here
  

February

• Arab Human Development Report: Empowering Women?, Thursday, February 1, 12:30-2pm, IAB, Room # 1501
  
• featuring Lila Abu-Lughod, Professor of Anthropology and Women and Gender Studies, Columbia University, Azza Karam, Senior Policy Research Advisor of the United Nations Development Program and Coordinator for the U.N. Arab Human Development Report, Frances Hasso, Associate Professor of Gender & Women's Studies and Sociology, Oberlin College, and Fida Adely, Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of International and Transcultural Studies, Teachers College
• co-sponored with the Middle East Institute

March

• Gender Breakfast, Friday, March 2, 9:15-11:15am, 754 Schermerhorn Extension:
• Martha Howell, Miriam Champion Professor of History, "Redefining Marriage: “Movable” Wealth & the Emergence of the Companionate Marriage in Early Modern Europe, 1300-1700"
• The history of the rise of the “companionate marriage,” a marriage formed by the mutual consent of the couple alone and based on romantic love and friendship rather than socioeconomic and political interests, is usually told in terms of culture and demography: first, the medieval church’s insistence on consent as the foundation of marriage “freed” people to marry for romantic love and, second, the birth of the nuclear family enabled new, intimate ties between husband and wife. At this Friday’s breakfast, Martha Howell shares with us from her current book project in asking how property remained part of the equation and arguing that the commercialization of wealth during this period helps account for the ideology and practices associated with the notion of "companionate marriage."
• Howell is the author of The Marriage Exchange: Property, Social Place and Gender in Cities of the Low Countries, 1300-1550 and Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities.
• "Politics in the Wake of the Human" lecture series, date/time/location TBA
• co-organized by Saidiya Hartman, Columbia University and Neferti Tadiar, Barnard College
• Julia Kristeva, Professor of linguistics at the University of Paris VII, speaking on "Thinking Liberty in Dark Times," - Tuesday, March 6, 6:30 p.m., at the Rotunda in Low Library.
• In her lecture, Professor Julia Kristeva will address the concept of liberty today. She will explore two models of freedom within a context of globalization and in terms of the European model of freedom. She will also weave in personal remarks about her own background, coming as she does from Eastern Europe/the Balkans.
• Co-sponsored with the Hellenic Studies Program in collaboration with the Harriman Institute/East Central European Center, at Columbia University.
• ISERP/IRWAG Workshop - Gender and the Global Locations of Liberalism, March 6, 12:15-2pm, 754 Schermerhorn Ext.
•  Neferti Tadiar, Associate Professor, Women's Studies, Barnard College, "Metropolitan Debris: Forces and Fallout of Human Redemption"
• “Objects and Memory: Engendering Private and Public Archives” workshop: Friday, March 23, 1-7pm, 612 Schermerhorn Hall
• featuring Lila Abu-Lughod, Professor of Anthropology and Women and Gender Studies, Columbia University; Patricia Dailey, Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University; Marianne Hirsch, Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Women and Gender Studies, Columbia University; Andreas Huyssen, Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Columbia University; Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies, New York University; Nancy K. Miller, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center, CUNY; Valerie Smith, Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature and Director of the Program in African American Studies, Princeton University; Silvia Spitta, Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, Dartmouth College; Leo Spitzer, Visiting Professor of History, Columbia University, and Kate Stanley, PhD candidate in English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University; with artist presentations by Lorie Novak, Professor of Photography & Imaging, New York University, presenting Reverb, and Renata Stih & Frieder Schnock presenting Things Matter: Tracing Objects Across Artistic Practice.
• co-sponsored with the Columbia Cultural Memory Colloquium and the Department of Art History and Archaeology.
  
• Anna Grimshaw, Associate Professor in Visual Culture at Emory University, Atlanta, speaking on "'Material Woman': Elspeth Owen and The Materials of Art and Anthropology " - Thursday, March 28, 4:30-6pm, 501 Schermerhorn
• Material Woman (22 minutes) is an experiment in collaboration across the art and anthropology divide. Drawing on a shared commitment to feminist ethnographic practice, anthropologist Anna Grimshaw and artist Elspeth Owen explore the process of “making do”, that is, the working with, and shaping of, found materials. The video screening will serve as a focus for discussion about gender, the senses and the role of the camera in generating new forms of anthropological knowledge.
  

April

• Clare Lees, King's College, University of London, speaking on "Gender Indifference? Women, Sexuality and Anglo-Saxon Studies" - Tuesday, April 3, 5:30pm, location TBA
• In conjunction with the course "Theorizing Gender Before 1500"
  
• Anglo-Saxon Studies Colloquium
  
• "Gender and Politics" colloquium series
  
• featuring Anna Kirkland, Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and Political Science, University of Michigan, speaking on "Ideologies of the Fat Rights Movement"
• Thursday, April 5, 4:10pm, Lindsay Rogers Room, 707 IAB
• How do stigmatized people who are excluded from legal protections muster descriptions of themselves as deserving inclusion in antidiscrimination laws? Analysis of in-depth interviews with fat acceptance advocates from around the United States, nearly all of them women, reveals elaborate and non-legal daily coping strategies that co-exist with much more narrowly framed arguments for rights. Her account explicates the very difficult rhetorical position fat acceptance advocates are currently in and explains how this position reveals the limitations of the antidiscrimination discourses we all depend upon.
• Please click here for a copy of her paper she will be presenting.
  
• and Gretchen Ritter, Associate Professor of Government and Director of the Center for Women's and Gender Studies, University of Texas, Austin, speaking on "Work-Family Conflict and Gender Politics in the United States"
  
• Please click here for a copy of her paper she will be presenting
• co-sponsored by the Political Science department
• Gender Breakfast, Friday, April 6, 9:15-11:15am, 754 Schermerhorn Extension:
• Graduate student papers and prospectuses Workshop with Professor Sharon Marcus
• Aleida Assmann, leading scholar in memory studies and Professor of English & Literary Theory, University of Konstanz, speaking on "Gender and Memory" - Wednesday, April 18, 8:00pm, Deutsches Haus, 420 West 116th Street (Between Amsterdam Avenue and Morningside Drive)
• presented by The Department of Germanic Languages, the Columbia Cultural Memory Colloquium, the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, and the Department of English and Comparative Literature.
• Penda Mbow, former Senegalese Minister of Culture, Associate Professor of History at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, and a public figure and activist on democracy, civil society and women’s issues, speaking on "Islam, Women and Human Rights in Senegal" - Wednesday, April 18, 4:00pm, IAB 1512
• Professor Mbow will discuss issues of religion and political development in Senegal with a focus on challenges that women face due to the Citizenship Law and Personal Status Law. Of particular interest to her is the relationship between liberalism and individual rights, on the one hand, and Islamic society regulated by a secular state on the other. Professor Mbow will close with an evaluation of the role of religious education reform in strengthening notions of citizenship and gender equality.
  
• cosponsored by the Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration and Religion, SIPA
• For more information, visit www.sipa.columbia.edu/cdtr
  
• Mieke Bal, Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences Professor (KNAW) and Professor of the Theory of Literature in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Amsterdam, speaking on "2MOVE: Video and Migratory Aesthetics" - Friday, April 20, 12:15-2pm, 754 Schermerhorn Ext.
  
  • sponsored by The Cultural Memory Colloquium and the Nederlandse Taalunie through the Queen Wilhelmina Chair at Columbia, cosponsored by IRWaG
• Gender Breakfast, Friday, April 27, 9:15-11:15am, 754 Schermerhorn Extension:
• Aagje Ieven, Fulbright visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Human Rights, Columbia University, speaking on "The Subject of Rights (m/f)? The European Court of Human Rights Jurisprudence on Transsexuals"
• This talk considers the European Court of Human Rights’ recent adjudication on transsexualism. While generally seen as having improved the condition of transsexuals, Aajge Ieven questions the Court’s requirement of complete physical adaptation to the new sex. This requirement involves severe physical harm, does not protect transgendered individuals, and reinforces the assumption that legal sex reflects biological sex and that biological sex is unambiguous, singular, static, and binary. Examining different types of legal regulations which differentiate or discriminate on the basis of sex, Ieven argues that only non-discrimination measures are necessary for a stable democratic society, and that, for this purpose, legal sex does not need to be an unambiguous, singular, static, and binary structured category recorded at birth.
• Aagje Ieven is a Fulbright visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Human Rights. She is a doctoral candidate in Law at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium.  After obtaining a bachelor’s degree in Medicine (Leuven, 1998), Ieven completed her master’s degree in Philosophy with a thesis on the tensions between feminism and liberalism. At Columbia, Ms. Ieven will be conducting research for her doctoral dissertation on “Privacy between Autonomy and Identity: an Ethical Political Perspective on Privacy Rights in European and International Human Rights Law.”
• Paper available via e-mail
• ISERP/IRWAG Workshop - Gender and the Global Locations of Liberalism, May 2, 12:15-2pm, 754 Schermerhorn Ext.
•  Nadia Guessous, Ph.D. Candidate, Anthropology Department, Columbia University, "Modernity and Tradition in Left-Liberal Feminist Thought in Morocco"
•  This paper explores how tradition and modernity get conceptualized and discursively invoked at different moments in left-liberal feminist thought in contemporary Morocco. Juxtaposing the figure of the “traditional, pious and egalitarian father”, whose enabling influence figures prominently in feminist narratives, with that of the figure of the disappointing and failed “leftist husband who claims to be modern but is in fact traditional”, this paper suggests that feminist thought and criticism cannot be apprehended outside of the modern terms and conditions that constitute it. Through a discussion of how tradition gets invoked as both enabling and constraining in feminist narratives, and how modernity gets imagined and discursively constructed as that which has not yet been fully realized, this paper explores how feminist subjects are conscripted into the project and idea of modernity and are obliged to couch their arguments in its teleological terms.
  
• Senior Thesis Presentations - Friday, May 4, 4pm, TBA.
  
  • inconjunction with Barnard
  
  

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  Fall 2006

   

  September

  • Gender Breakfast, Friday, September 15, 9:15-11:15am, 754 Schermerhorn Extension:
  • Elizabeth Castelli, Associate Professor of Religion, Barnard College, "Branded By God: Christian Teen Revivalism and the Culture Wars Remixed "
  • Josephine Baker - A Century in the Spotlight: In Commemoration of the 100th Anniversary of the Birth of Josephine Baker, September 29 - October 1
  • With keynote address by Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times critic Margo Jefferson
  • Baker's Parisian triumph of the 1920s and 1930s is an episode in history that cannot be accepted at face value, all the more so because her stardom has continued to resonate in art, in literature, in the media, in politics, in architecture, and in academia in both France and the United States up to the present day – moving far beyond the banana skirt forever associated with her name.
    
  • This interdisciplinary colloquium takes a close look at the phenomenon that was and is Josephine Baker. Chorus-girl and music hall diva, painter’s muse and business woman, resistance worker and movie star, Baker - at once agent and object – shines a spotlight on the transatlantic spaces through which she moved, offering a mirror in which the whole of the twentieth century is reflected.
    
  • Organized by Kaiama l. Glover, Assistant Professor in the French and Africa and African Diaspora Studies, Barnard College, and Farah Griffin, Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African-American Studies, Columbia University
  • For more information, updated program information including Colloquium participants, and to pre-reigster, please visit the website
    
  • FEMINIST Interventions - Tuesday, September 26, 7pm, 612 Schermerhorn Hall:
  • Jenny Davidson, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, "Why Girls Look Like Their Mothers: Rewriting Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale"
    
    
   

  October

  • Toril Moi on Hedda Gabler - Modernity, Marriage and the Everyday - Thursday, October 19, 7pm, Deutsches Haus, 420 W. 116th St., between Amsterdam Avenue and Morningside Drive:
  • The author of a major new study on the modernism of Henrik Ibsen explores the women’s world of the title character in one of his most intriguing plays.
    
  • Toril Moi is also the author of What Is a Woman? and Other Essays (2001), Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (2003), and Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (1985).
    
  • The public is invited, admission is free, a reception will follow. Co-sponsored by the Columbia Swedish Program in cooperation with the university’s Departments of Germanic Languages, English, and Classics, as well as the Norwegian Consulate in New York.
    
  • For more information, please call 212-854-4015 or e-mail: vam1@columbia.edu.
  • Book Parties, Empire of Love: A Book Party with Elizabeth Povinelli, Tuesday, October 24, 4:30-6pm, 754 Schermerhorn Extension:
  • In celebration of Elizabeth Povinelli's new work, Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, And Carnality

  November

  • Gender Breakfast, Friday, November 10, 9:15-11:15am, 754 Schermerhorn Extension:
  • Jean Howard & Ansley Erickson, Vice Provost for Diversity Initiatives & History Department Ph.D. Candidate, respectively, speaking on "Glass Ceilings: Parenting and Academia"
  • Please join us for a discussion of the current situation facing parents at Columbia and in academia. Parenting is an issue that is pervasive in academic life, yet it tends to only be discussed when it is a problem, as a problem, and in segmented chunks: faculty, adjuncts, students, and others are considered individually. For anyone whose present or future resides in academia, with hopes for a life outside of academia.
    
  • Columbia's maternity leave policy is available online:
    http://www.columbia.edu/cu/gsas/pages/cstudents/std-ser/childbirth/index.html
  • Catharine MacKinnon, Professor of Law, University of Michigan, speaking on “Women's Status, Men's States” - Tuesday, November 14, 7:30pm, Altschul Auditorium, IAB
    
  • Professor MacKinnon is involved in litigation, legislation, and policy development on women's human rights domestically and internationally. She is currently representing pro bono Croatian and Muslim women and children victims of Serbian genocidal sexual atrocities seeking remedies under international law.
    
  • For more information, please visit the Heyman Center
  • Lily Munir, Founder and Executive Director of the Center for Pesantren and Democracy Studies (CePDeS), Indonesia, speaking on “The Introduction of Sharia-nuanced By-Laws and the Creation of Patriarchy in Indonesia,” Monday, November 20, 6-7:30pm, Lindsay Rogers Room, 707 IAB
    
  • Lily Munir founded the Center for Pesantren and Democracy Studies (CePDeS), was an International Commissioners of the Joint Electoral Management Body (JEMB) of Afghanistan, a research fellow on Islam and Human Rights Programme of the School of Law of Emory University in Atlanta, GA, under the leadership of Prof. Abdullahi A. An-Na’im, and a visiting lecturer on the subject of Women’s/Human Rights under Shariah at the University of South Carolina’s School of Law. Her lectures covered three main areas: Introduction to Islamic Law, Islam and Human Rights, and Islamic Feminism.ston University, and the MARA Institute of Technology in the fields of international relations and journalism.
  • Sponsored by the Center for the Study of Democracy and Religion (CDTR). The talk will be co-sponsored by IRWaG, the Center for the Study of Law and Culture (Law School), and the Southeast Asian Student Group.
  • Bina Agarwal, Professor of Economics, Institute of Economic Growth, University of Delhi, India, speaking on “Domestic Violence and Women's Property Status: The Neglected Obvious,” a Barbara Aronstein Black Lecture - Thursday, November 30, 4:30pm, Room 101, Jerome Green Hall (116th and Amsterdam).
    
  • For more on Prof. Agarwal, go to http://www.ashinstitute.harvard.edu/Ash/bagarwal.htm.
  • Co-sponsors Columbia Law School and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender