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Click here for feminist faculty interviews
Wednesday, February 15
Stacy Hubbard (English)
“Marianne Moore's National/Natural Histories”
Noon to 1:30, Clemens 1004
The modernist American poet, Marianne Moore, was an avid student of natural
history whose reading and lecture notes reveal wide knowledge of ornithology,
zoology, botany, garden design, and art historical depictions of plants and animals.
In her poems about American places, she often raises questions ofnational history
and politics through descriptions of nature. This talk will focus on the ways that
Moore's poems invite reconsideration of the sexual and racial politics of America's founding through depictions of restored gardens and grounds at national historical
sites such as Jamestown and Williamsburg.
Friday, February 24
Roundtable on Early Modern Masculinities
Noon - 5:00 p.m., Park 532
Organized by Christian Flaugh (Romance Languages and Literatures) and
cosponsored by the Early Modern Research Workshop
This round-table discussion will investigate the struggles and the anxieties generated
by the attempt at constructing a successful model of manhood and selfhood through
an interdisciplinary analysis of representations of masculinity. The presenters will
explore the ambivalence around representations of masculinity as located in various spaces and discourses in the early modern period. They will also signal paramount questions of early modern selfhood such as what constituted the period’s notion of
male identities, what practices and narratives were designated as masculine, and ultimately what were the real steaks of constructing masculinity in the various
realms of the early modern world.
Click here for Schedule
Thursday, March 8
Presentations by Gender Institute
Dissertation Fellows
Noon to 1:30, Norton 9
Katie Grennell (American Studies) on
gender, disability & American popular music
Michael Hurst (English), “Heroic Slave Bodies: Epic Masculinity and Transcendence in Frederick Douglass”
Friday, March 23,
Noon to 1:30
Regina Mason and Rhonda Brace
“Searching for Ancestors: Extraordinary Discoveries”
NOTE ROOM CHANGE: Clemens 120
,
After years of searching for her family roots, Rhonda Brace of Springfield,
Massachusetts discovered that her ancestor, Jeffrey Brace, had published a memoir
of slavery in 1810. Ms. Brace then worked with Professor Kari Winter, the editor of
The Blind African Slave; or Memoirs of Boyrereau Brinch, Nicknamed Jeffrey Brace
(University of Wisconsin Press, 2005) to gather more information about the Brace
family’s history in New England from the Civil War to the present.
After years of searching for her family roots, Regina Mason of San Francisco,
California discovered that her ancestor, William Grimes, had published a memoir of
slavery in 1825. Ms. Mason formed a partnership with Professor William L. Andrews and
devoted years of research to produce a new edition of Life of William Grimes,
the Runaway Slave (Oxford University Press, 2008). Meeting each other for the
first time, these two women will share their unique stories of genealogical
research and academic collaborations.
Respondents: Barbara Nevergold, Uncrowned Queens Institute
Christopher Lee, Instructor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication,
University of Western Ontario
Candice Reynolds-Lee, sculptor from western Ontario who is a descendant of
Jeffrey Brace and several other remarkable ancestors
Thursday, April 5, Noon to 1:30
GENDER-NEUTRAL HOUSING AT UB:
BREAKING THROUGH THE BINARY OF
TRADITIONAL CAMPUS LIVING
Gender Institute, 207 The Commons
Join us for this panel discussion led by:
Trey Ufholcz, the 2011-12 M.S.W. intern with the Gender Institute
and members of the UB Student Advocacy Group for
Gender-Neutral Housing (GNH) at UB:
Ethan A. Gibson, Ph.D. Candidate Electrical Engineering and
Anderson Starrantino, first year student and future Nursing major
In January, UB decided to implement a Gender-Neutral
Housing Policy, starting in Fall 2012. Trey Ufholcz researched
current GNH policies at sister SUNY campuses and at colleges
across the U.S., and wrote the literature review on GNH
for the UB Campus Life Proposal for GNH.
April 12 - April 13
Gender Across Borders Symposium:
Arts, Action, Activism
More information
About the Workshop
The Feminist Research Alliance seeks to advance and energize
transnational feminist research in the 21st century by promoting
interdisciplinary conversation and collaboration among feminist
scholars locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally.
Our bi-weekly luncheon meetings offer opportunities for faculty and
graduate students to discuss their research, explore key texts of
classic and emerging feminisms, and develop research and teaching collaborations. The workshop also provides chances for graduate
students and junior faculty to meet potential committee members
or mentors beyond the boundaries of their home departments.
The Feminist Research Alliance is sponsored by the Humanities
Institute, the Gender Institute, and the Center for Disability Studies.
FALL 2011 EVENTS
Wednesday, September 14th
Noon to 1:30 p.m.
207 UB Commons – Gender Institute
Victoria Wolcott (History) will introduce
Toni Pressley-Sanon (African and African American Studies)
Bloodline/Bloodlust: Reading Race and Gender in Octavia Butler's Fledgling
Noon to 1:30
207 UB Commons – Gender Institute
Carine Mardorossian (English) will introduce
Margarita Vargas (Romance Languages and Literatures)
From Body to Voice and Back: 20th- Century Mexican Theatre
THIS PAPER WILL BE RE-PRESENTED
Saturday, October 15
6 p.m.
Casa de Arte
141 Elmwood Ave, Buffalo
More information
Tuesday, October 25
Noon to 1:30
207 Commons -- Gender Institute
Rae Muhlstock (English)
This Text Which is Not One: A Unity of Fragments in the Works of Shelley Jackson
UB Graduate Students Interview Feminist Faculty
Kamaria Busby, an M.A. student in American Studies,
interviewed Professor Alexis De Veaux (Global Gender Studies) on February 8, 2011.
An internationally acclaimed artist-activist-scholar, Professor De Veaux is the author of a major biography of Audre Lorde and several award-winning works of fiction. In this interview, she highlights a few aspects of her life and work from her childhood in Harlem to her scholarly specialization in Black diasporic women’s literatures. She says she teaches “out of my passion, because what I want my students to come away with, particularly, is a sense of the centrality of black women’s literary production, black women’s intellectual production, to larger discourses about what it means to be human, what it means to live in one’s time, what it means to be able to transgress time, what it means to be central to the project of social justice.”
Click here for a transcript of the interview.
Rachel Snyder Lockman, an M.A. student in UB’s English Department, interviewed
Lucinda M. Finley, Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs and the Frank Raichle Professor of Law,
on March 2, 2011.
Professor Finley’s research into how the male serves as the normative has led her to look at “tort law from a feminist perspective.” She asks: “To what extent are they [laws] not objective? To what extent are the laws framed to male needs? I found that, although there were not intentional biases, the laws didn’t fit women’s needs as well as men’s. This is especially true with tort law and what constitutes damage.”
Click here for a transcript of the interview.
Christine Ditzel, a Ph.D. student in American Studies,
interviewed Lois Weis, SUNY Distinguished Professor of
Educational Leadership and Policy, Graduate
College of Education,on February 1, 2011.
In this interview Professor Weis illuminates key issues in the underfunding of
American schools at the same time that she exemplifies an empowering
feminist praxis as a mentor of graduate students.
Click here for a transcript of the interview.
Beth Kuberka, a doctoral student in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, interviewed Carrie Tirado Bramen, Associate Professor of English and Executive Director of UB’s Humanities Institute on February 4, 2011.
In this interview, Professor Bramen describes the awakening of her passion for critical theory and archival research. She challenges each new generation of scholars to value the humanities as “a living archive of knowledges that have to be sustained . . . . The humanities have to challenge the market economy rather than try to assimilate to its rules.”
Click here for a transcript of the interview.
Jennifer Loft, an M.A. student in Global Gender Studies,
interviewed Susan Cahn, Professor of History, on February 8, 2011.
In this interview, Professor Cahn describes the emergence of her interests in women and sports, southern women's history, and feminist studies. She urges emerging feminist scholars to work hard, be true to themselves, and love what they do.
Click here for a transcript of the interview.
Kayla Chan, an M.A. student in Global Gender Studies,
interviewed Dr. Kush Bhardwaj on February 24, 2011.
Dr. Bhardwaj's research and teaching interests include Afro-diasporic cultural retentions in the United States vis-à-vis Ghana, resurrecting the socio-political significance of radical abolitionist John Brown (with an interactive informational website to be published in Fall 2011) and hip hop culture. His course, Hip Hop & Social Issues, was the first of its kind at SUNY Buffalo. Bhardwaj's forthcoming work, "Rap Gold In the Rust Belt," interrogates how antecedents in hip hop may affect the descendents of the culture and investigates how social and political literacy may arise in expressions of hip hop. His classes and writing on hip hop identify relationships between so-called racial authenticity in hip hop and the transcendence of hegemony and racial identity politics. In this interview, Dr. Bhardwaj describes what it means to him to be a male feminist.
Click here for a transcript of the interview.