Fall 2009

September

• IRWaG Graduate Colloquium:  IRWaG's Graduate Student Welcome & Cocktail Hour, Thursday, September 17th, 5-6:30pm, 754 Schermerhorn Ext.
• COME for free food & drink; STAY to discover the resources IRWaG has to offer graduate students ...
  -- to learn about fellowship and grant opportunities, workshops to enhance your research, and the Graduate Certificate in Feminist Studies ...
  -- to see old friends and colleagues and meet new ones ...
  -- and to share YOUR input for the 2009-10 programming at the Institute!
• ALL graduate students interested in questions of gender and/or sexuality - of all stages, departments, and disciplines - are welcome.  Come and join IRWaG's diverse and interdisciplinary intellectual community!
• IRWaG Graduate Colloquium:  Theory Mondays: Barbara Johnson Memorial Gathering, Tuesday, September 22nd, 4:30-6:30pm, 465 Schermerhorn Ext.
• Barbara Johnson died on August 27.  Marianne Hirsch, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Patricia Williams invite you to join them at an informal memorial gathering of readings and reflections.
• Please come and bring a brief passage from her work that you might wish to read. 
  
• This memorial is part of IRWaG's "Theory Monday" series which is dedicated to conversations about important books.  We wish to honor Johnson's brilliant and ground-breaking theoretical contributions by reading and talking about her work in her memory.
• Barbara Ellen Johnson was a Frederic Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society at Harvard University where she taught for the past 25 years. Johnson  earned her undergraduate degree from Oberlin College, and her PHD from Yale.  A world renowned literary critic and theorist, Johnson was the author of numerous books including Defigurations du langage poetique, The Critical Difference, A World of Difference, The Wake of Deconstruction, The Feminist Difference, and her latest book, Persons and Things, published last year.  She treated her final degenerative illness with mordant wit and courage, continuing to write and bringing to publication her extraordinary translation of Mallarme's 1897 version of Divagations in 2007.
• Co-sponsored Event: A Blog of Her Own: Scholarly Women on the Web, Monday, September 21st, 12:30pm, 555 Alfred Lerner Hall. 
• The event will be a roundtable discussion centering on blogging, gender, and scholarship.
• Confirmed participants are: Tedra Osell, Ventura College, blogging as Bitch PhD, Claire Potter, of Wesleyan, blogging as Tenured Radical;" Alexandra Vazquez, Princeton, who is one of three creators of the Oh! Industry blog; and Eva Amsen, University of Toronto, who blogs at Easternblot.net and on Nature Networks. 
• Moderated by Jenny Davidson, Columbia University English and Comparative Literature professor and blogger
• The speakers will discuss the interplay between their blogging and scholarship, attitudes towards blogging among their colleagues, how blogging should be valued in the academy, and blogging as a feminist act. The Columbia community is encouraged to send questions for the bloggers in advance to kp2002@columbia.edu.
• Sponsored by the Scholarly Communication Program, the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, and Women in Science at Columbia. Details at http://scholcomm.columbia.edu/events-calendar.

October

• Co-sponsored Event: Women, Philosophy, and History: Conference in Celebration of Eileen O'Neill, Friday, October 2, 12:30pm and Saturday, 10/3, 9:00am, Sulzberger Parlor, 3rd Floor Barnard Hall
• Click here to download the conference program.
• This two-day conference continues the groundbreaking work of Eileen O'Neill '75 by examining the standard narrative of the history of philosophy from a feminist perspective. O'Neill's pioneering scholarship has brought to light the texts and ideas of women in the early modern period, and demonstrated the substantial contributions they made to philosophy. Her work has encouraged the analysis of thinkers as diverse as Marie de Gournay, Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Elisabeth of Bohemia, Anna Maria van Schurman, Mary Astell, Émilie du Châtelet, and Damaris Masham. It has also challenged philosophers to reconsider methodological assumptions that have hidden these women and their works from view. The eminent international scholars gathered for this conference will continue this exploration and discuss the methodological, pedagogical, and philosophical implications of O'Neill's work. The conference also celebrates the impact of O'Neill's commitment to women in philosophy more generally.
• Participants include Lanier Anderson (Stanford), Martha Bolton (Rutgers), Desmond Clarke (University College Cork), John Conley (Loyola College, Maryland), Marguerite Deslauriers (McGill University), Karen Detlefsen (University of Pennsylvania), Ann Ferguson (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), Alan Gabbey (Barnard College), Dan Garber (Princeton University), Don Garrett (New York University), Karen Green (University of Monash, Australia), Gary Hatfield (University of Pennsylvania), Sarah Hutton (Aberystwyth University), Dan Kaufman (University of Colorado), Anne Marie Keyes (Marymount Manhattan College), Marcy Lascano (California State, Long Beach), Ernan McMullin (University of Notre Dame), Stephen Menn (McGill University), Christia Mercer (Columbia University), James Ross (University of Pennsylvania), Marleen Rozemond (University of Toronto), Tad Schmaltz (University of Michigan), Lisa Shapiro (Simon Fraser), Alison Simmons (Harvard University), Robert Sleigh (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), Alice Sowaal (San Francisco State University), Connie Titone (Villanova University), Mary Ellen Waithe (Cleveland State University), Sue Weinberg (Hunter College, CUNY), and Eileen O'Neill (University of Massachusetts, Amherst).
• Sponsored by: Barnard Center for Research on Women; The Philosophy Departments of Barnard College, Columbia University, Nassau Community College, Princeton University, Queens College (CUNY), Simon Fraser University, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, University of Notre Dame, and University of Pennsylvania; the Provost of Barnard College; the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, Columbia University; Office of the Dean of Arts & Humanities, Harvard University; NYU Issues in Modern Philosophy Conference Series, sponsored by the NYU Department of Philosophy and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences; Dean of Humanities, Department of Philosophy, and Program in Feminist Studies, Stanford University.
  
• Co-sponsored Event: Shawn Michelle Smith - "The Politics of Pictorialism: Race and Erotics in the Photographs of F. Holland Day," Tuesday, October 6th, 6:30 pm, 754 Schermerhorn Extension
• Part of Professor Saidiya Hartman's G6001 Theoretical Paradigms in Feminist Thought Course on Haunted Visuality: The Sight and Senses of Race.
• Sponsored by Engendering Archives, CCASD and IRWAG
• IRWaG Graduate Colloquium: Research Fridays with Julie Golia, Friday, October 9th, 12:45pm-2pm, 754 Schermerhorn Ext.
• Julie Golia will be sharing with us a selection from her dissertation, "Queen of Heartaches": The Newspaper Advice Columnist as Icon and Journalist" and Rachel Adams, a professor from the English Department, will comment.
• Co-sponsored Event: Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, reading from her new collection of poems, The Scattered Papers of Penelope, Tuesday, October 13th, 6pm, 233 Milbank Hall, Barnard College
• Sponsored by the Hellenic Studies Department
  
• Co-sponsored Event: Translated Feminisms: China and Elsewhere Workshop, Friday and Saturday, October 16-17th, 754 Schermerhorn Ext.
• Organized by Professors Lydia Liu, Dorothy Ko and Rebecca Karl (NYU)
• Participants include: Lila Abu-Lughod (Columbia University), Swapna Banerjee (Brooklyn College), Marilyn Booth (University of Edinburgh), Amy Dooling (Connecticut College), Yukiko Hanawa (New York University), Gail Hershatter (UC Santa Cruz), Michael Hill (University of South Carolina), Nancy Rose Hunt (University of Michigan), Janet Jakobsen (Barnard College), Rebecca Karl (New York University), Dorothy Ko (Barnard College), Joyce Liu (National Chiao Tung University), Lydia Liu (Columbia University), Viren Murthy (University of Ottawa), Mae Ngai (Columbia University), Beth Povinelli (Columbia University), Tze-Lan Deborah Sang (University of Oregon), Neferti Tadiar (Barnard College), Elizabeth Weed (Brown University), Marilyn Young (New York University), 
  
• Co-sponsored Event: Mary E. John, speaking on "Reframing Globalisation and Internationalism: Feminism in India and the Question of Asia," Monday, October 19th, 4pm, 754 Schermrhorn Ext.
• Mary E. John is Senior Fellow and Director, Centre for Women in Developing Societies (New Delhi, India). She is the author of Discrepant Dislocations: Feminism, Theory and Postcolonial Histories and editor of: Women’s Studies in India: A Reader, and Contested Transformations: Changing Economies and Identities in Contemporary India (with Praveen Jha and Surinder Jodhka) 
• The event is part of ISERP’s project on “Gender and the Global Locations of Liberalism” and is sponsored by the Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference
• IRWaG Graduate Colloquium:  Theory Mondays: on Meaghan Morris with Catherine Driscoll, Monday, October 26th, 4:30-6:00pm, 754 Schermerhorn Ext.
• We will be going over "Banality in Cultural Studies"
• Catherine Driscoll is Associate Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney and IRWaG Visiting Scholar. She works in a range of fields, including cultural theory, online culture, modernity, rural studies, popular and youth culture (especially girl culture). Her publications include Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture and Cultural Theory (Columbia UP, 2002) and Modernist Cultural Studies (UP of Florida, 2009). Forthcoming publications include Teen Film: A Critical Introduction (Berg, 2010), The Australian Country Girl (Ashgate, 2011) and a book on online culture (co-authored with Melissa Gregg). Other current projects include work on consent and an Australian Research Council project researching cultural sustainability in Australian country towns.
  

November

• Catherine Waldby, Department of Sociology and Social Policy, The University of Sydney - "Citizenship, Labor and the Biopolitics of the Bioeconomy: Recruiting Female Tissue Donors for Stem Cell Research"(Part of the Embodiments of Science Workshop), Friday, November 6th, 4:10pm, Sulzberger Parlor, 3rd floor, Barnard Hall, Barnard College
• 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 egg sharing and egg vending. It will locate this tension in both a feminist biopolitical analysis and in the broader dynamics of the global bioeconomy.
  
• Co-sponsored with the Barnard Center for Research on Women and the Barnard Provost Office
• Co-sponsored Event: Amira Hass, speaking on "Palestine and  Israeli Occupation," Monday, November 9,  12-2pm, Room 207 Knox Hall
• Amira Hass is a graduate of the Hebrew University. Since 1989 she has worked on the staff of Haaretz, first as copy editor, and since 1993 as a reporter on Israeli Occupation and Palestinian life. She lived in Gaza from 1993 through 1997, and since then in Ramallah. Her books in English are Drinking the Sea at Gaza (2000) and Reporting from Ramalla (2003).  Breaking the blockade, she reported from Gaza during the last war. This October, Hass was awarded the 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award from International Woman's Media Foundation for "her ability to defy boundaries of gender, ethnicity, and religion in her pursuit of the truth in her reporting." (from IWMF's Press Release).
  
• FEMINIST Interventions - Carol Sanger, Barbara Aronstein Black Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, speaking on "Abortion and the Visual Construction of Loss," and Anne Higonnet, Professor of Art History, Barnard, responding, Thursday, November 12th, 4-6pm, Case Lounge, 701 Jerome Greene Hall
• Cosponsored with the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law
  
• IRWaG Graduate Colloquium: Research Fridays with Elizabeth Bernstein, Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and Sociology, speaking on "Militarized Humanitarianism Meets Carceral Feminism: the Politics of Sex, Rights, and Freedom in Contemporary Anti-Trafficking Campaigns," Friday, November 20th, 12:30pm-2pm, 754 Schermerhorn Ext.
• Roxana Galusca, a visiting scholar from the University of Michigan, will comment.