Happening @ Michigan https://events.umich.edu/list/rss RSS Feed for Happening @ Michigan Events at the University of Michigan. The Body as Puppet: What Cosplay does for Taiwanese Women (October 1, 2019 2:30pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/67623 67623-16907170@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, October 1, 2019 2:30pm
Location: Lane Hall
Organized By: Women's and Gender Studies Department

In the twenty-first century, the Japanese manga and anime industry has opened markets around the world. As manga and anime have spread, so too has the fan practice of cosplay, dressing up as animated characters. The vast majority of cosplayers around the world are women. In this paper, I examine the practice of cosplay in Taiwan, and in particular, cosplayers who dress as characters from a unique Taiwanese genre of animation, “digital video swordplay puppetry.” There is a continuum of how cosplayers think and talk about cosplay. Some cosplayers, especially in North America, see cosplaying as a kind of acting and say they want to “become the character.” Others, especially in Asia, see cosplay more in terms of bringing puppet characters to life, (re)animating them. I argue that cosplay appeals primarily to women because it is a pleasurable play form of the kinds of work that they are expected to do at work and in their social lives. Cosplay allows women to experiment with different ways of blending embodied and disembodied, performative and animating, forms of affective labor.

Book giveaway! We will hold a raffle for free copies of Dr. Silvio’s new book for anyone who arrives in costume (please no weapons). Cosplayers welcome!

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Lecture / Discussion Wed, 25 Sep 2019 11:32:51 -0400 2019-10-01T14:30:00-04:00 2019-10-01T15:30:00-04:00 Lane Hall Women's and Gender Studies Department Lecture / Discussion Puppets, Gods, and Brands, Dr. Teri Silvio
Community of Scholars 2019 Symposium (October 25, 2019 11:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/68229 68229-17028946@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, October 25, 2019 11:30am
Location: Lane Hall
Organized By: Institute for Research on Women and Gender

The Community of Scholars is comprised of recipients of 2019 summer fellowships from IRWG and the Rackham Graduate School for graduate students pursuing research, scholarship, or creative activities focusing on women and/or gender.

SCHEDULE:

11:30 am: Lunch and Opening Remarks (Lunch will be provided. Please RSVP: http://myumi.ch/O4Xmk)

12:00 - 1:20 pm: Sex, Structure, Surveillance
-Aida Levy-Hussen (Director of Graduate Studies, Associate Professor, English), Panel Chair
-Kamaria Porter (Education), "Speaking Into Silence: Intersections of Identity, Legality, and the Decision to Report Sexual Violence on Campus"
-Molly Brookfield (History), "Wolves, Sailors, and the Normalization of Street Harassment"
-Traci Carson (Public Health), "The Silent Culture and Consequences of Low Energy Availability in Current and Former Female Distance Runners: A Mixed Methods Investigation

1:20 - 3:00 pm: Reframing Narratives
-LaKisha Simmons (Associate Professor, Women’s Studies and History), Panel Chair
-Emily Gauld (German), “Composing the Learned Woman: Gender and Nation in 19th-Century German Music Pedagogy”
-Michelle May-Curry (American Culture), “'My Inheritance:' The Movement Girl and The Family Archive”
-Jennifer Alzate González (English), “Meditation on Digital Precarity: How Feminist of Color Resource Lists and Bibliographies Survive 404 Errors”
-Zach Schudson (Psychology/Women’s Studies), “Gender/Sex Majorities’ Motivated Disruption of Gender/Sex Diversity Research”

10 Minute Break

3:10 - 4:30 pm: (Re)Building Lives and Communities
-Allison Alexy (Assistant Professor, Women’s Studies and Asian Languages and Cultures), Panel Chair
-Anne Clark (Sociology), “How does residential mobility affect sex and contraceptive use during women’s transition to adulthood?”
-Steph Fajardo (History), “The Prostituted Woman: Gender and Nationalism in Postwar Philippine Society”
-Chelle Jones (Sociology), “Balancing Safety and Visibility: Lesbian Community Building Strategies in South Korea”

Lunch will be provided. Please RSVP to help us with ordering: http://myumi.ch/O4Xmk

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Conference / Symposium Wed, 16 Oct 2019 15:19:08 -0400 2019-10-25T11:30:00-04:00 2019-10-25T16:30:00-04:00 Lane Hall Institute for Research on Women and Gender Conference / Symposium group photo of the Community of Scholars fellows on the steps of Lane Hall
Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right Is Warping the American Imagination (November 1, 2019 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/67254 67254-16829028@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, November 1, 2019 3:00pm
Location: Lane Hall
Organized By: Institute for Research on Women and Gender

What is the alt-right? What do they believe, and how did they take center stage in the American social and political consciousness?

From a loose movement that lurked in the shadows in the early 2000s, the alt-right has achieved a level of visibility that has allowed it to expand significantly throughout America’s cultural, political, and digital landscapes. Racist, sexist, and homophobic beliefs that were previously unspeakable have become commonplace, normalized, and accepted—endangering American democracy and society as a whole. Yet in order to dismantle the destructive movement that has invaded our public consciousness, we must first understand the core beliefs that drive the alt-right.

To help guide us through the contemporary moment, historian Alexandra Minna Stern excavates the alt-right memes and tropes that have erupted online and explores the alt-right’s central texts, narratives, constructs, and insider language. She digs to the root of the alt-right’s motivations: their deep-seated fear of an oncoming “white genocide” that can only be remedied through swift and aggressive action to reclaim white power. As the group makes concerted efforts to cast off the vestiges of neo-Nazism and normalize their appearance and their beliefs, the alt-right and their ideas can be hard to recognize. Through careful analysis, Stern brings awareness to the underlying concepts that guide the alt-right and animate its overlapping forms of racism, xenophobia, transphobia, and anti-egalitarianism. She explains the key ideas of “red-pilling,” strategic trolling, gender essentialism, and the alt-right’s ultimate fantasy: a future where minorities have been removed and “cleansed” from the body politic and a white ethnostate is established in the United States. By unearthing the hidden mechanisms that power white nationalism, Stern reveals just how pervasive this movement truly is.

5 copies of the book will be given away at the begining of the event! Must be present to win.

This event is part of IRWG's Gender: New Works, New Questions series, which spotlights recent publications by U-M faculty.

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Lecture / Discussion Tue, 22 Oct 2019 11:43:48 -0400 2019-11-01T15:00:00-04:00 2019-11-01T16:30:00-04:00 Lane Hall Institute for Research on Women and Gender Lecture / Discussion book cover
Transformismo masculino: Drag King Performance in Post-Socialist Cuba (November 4, 2019 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/68091 68091-17009820@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, November 4, 2019 4:00pm
Location: Lane Hall
Organized By: Lesbian, Gay, Queer Research Initiative (LGQRI)

In this talk, I consider the work transformismo masculino (drag king performance) is doing during a time of social and economic transformation in post-socialist Cuba. Over the past ten years, Cuba has witnessed the growth of a private economic sector dependent on tourism and the unfolding of a so-called “sexual revolution” aimed at combating homophobia and transphobia. Both of these reform movements have been criticized, however, for the lack of material gains experienced by women and Afrodescendants on the island. In response, some independent projects have emerged that draw on histories of Afrofeminist and antiracist critique in Cuba to elaborate an Afroqueer social vision for the future. I examine the performances of Havana’s transformistas masculinas (drag kings) in this context to discuss how they critique normative masculinity, create space for Black lesbian women, and promote dignity for ordinary Cubans. This work, along with the broader Afroqueer movement of which it is a part, resonates with related artist-activism throughout the hemisphere that imagines social possibilities that go beyond the well-documented alliances between neoliberalism and LGBT rights.

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Lecture / Discussion Mon, 07 Oct 2019 10:29:04 -0400 2019-11-04T16:00:00-05:00 2019-11-04T17:30:00-05:00 Lane Hall Lesbian, Gay, Queer Research Initiative (LGQRI) Lecture / Discussion photo of Matthew Leslie Santana
The Closet and the Cul-de-Sac: The Politics of Sexual Privacy in Northern California (December 6, 2019 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/68101 68101-17009833@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, December 6, 2019 12:00pm
Location: Lane Hall
Organized By: Lesbian, Gay, Queer Research Initiative (LGQRI)

The right to privacy is a pivotal concept in the culture wars that have galvanized American politics for the past several decades. It has become a rallying point for political issues ranging from abortion to gay liberation to sex education. Yet this notion of privacy originated not only from legal arguments, nor solely from political movements on the left or the right, but instead from ambivalent moderates who valued both personal freedom and the preservation of social norms.

In The Closet and the Cul-de-Sac, Clayton Howard chronicles the rise of sexual privacy as a fulcrum of American cultural politics. Beginning in the 1940s, public officials pursued an agenda that both promoted heterosexuality and made sexual privacy one of the state's key promises to its citizens. The 1944 G.I. Bill, for example, excluded gay veterans and enfranchised married ones in its dispersal of housing benefits. At the same time, officials required secluded bedrooms in new suburban homes and created educational campaigns designed to teach children respect for parents' privacy. In the following decades, measures such as these helped to concentrate middle-class families in the suburbs and gay men and lesbians in cities.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the gay rights movement invoked privacy to attack repressive antigay laws, while social conservatives criticized tolerance for LGBT people as an assault on their own privacy. Many self-identified moderates, however, used identical rhetoric to distance themselves from both the discriminatory language of the religious right and the perceived excesses of the gay freedom struggle. Using the Bay Area as a case study, Howard places these moderates at the center of postwar American politics and shows how the region's burgeoning suburbs reacted to increasing gay activism in San Francisco. The Closet and the Cul-de-Sac offers specific examples of the ways in which government policies shaped many Americans' attitudes about sexuality and privacy and the ways in which citizens mobilized to reshape them.


About the speaker:
Clayton Howard earned his PhD in history from the University of Michigan in 2010, and he is an associate professor of history at the Ohio State University. He is a specialist in the postwar histories of sexuality, politics, cities, and suburbs. His book The Closet and the Cul-de-Sac was published in March 2019, and an essay that he wrote on the Log Cabin Republicans will appear in an anthology entitled Beyond the Politics of the Closet: Gay Rights and the American State Since the 1970s.

Lunch will be provided. Please register so we have an accurate count for ordering: http://myumi.ch/Plx7R

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Lecture / Discussion Mon, 07 Oct 2019 12:37:20 -0400 2019-12-06T12:00:00-05:00 2019-12-06T13:30:00-05:00 Lane Hall Lesbian, Gay, Queer Research Initiative (LGQRI) Lecture / Discussion photo of Clayton Howard
Exhibit Opening & Reception: New York City’s Vanished Cafeterias (January 16, 2020 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/69471 69471-17327206@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, January 16, 2020 4:00pm
Location: Lane Hall
Organized By: Institute for Research on Women and Gender

Remarks at 4:30pm by the artist and by Jennifer Friess, UMMA Assistant Curator of Photography.

The streets of New York City were filled with hundreds of cafeterias, self-service eating establishments, during the early to mid-20th Century. Their growth paralleled the rise of the office worker, women’s evolving roles in the work force, immigration, American love of efficiency and novelty, the growth of cities, the impact of Prohibition and the Depression, the labor movement, and American eating habits. Not one cafeteria from that era remains in New York City today. One particular restaurant, Dubrow’s Cafeteria in Brooklyn, was a legendary institution that served as a second home for many of the neighborhood’s elderly residents. Along with another Dubrow’s, a hub of the Garment Center, they provided a restaurant-cum-social club or “third place” for a generation of Jewish New Yorkers. New York City-based photographer Marcia Bricker Halperin documented Dubrow’s and other cafeterias in their waning days, drawn to the memorable faces and the liveliness and sorrow of urban life in that vanished world.

Cosponsors: Jean and Samuel Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, Department of Women’s Studies

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Exhibition Wed, 04 Dec 2019 08:18:53 -0500 2020-01-16T16:00:00-05:00 2020-01-16T17:30:00-05:00 Lane Hall Institute for Research on Women and Gender Exhibition Dubrow's Cafeteria, Brooklyn, NY 1975
"Pathways of Desire: The Sexual Migration of Mexican Gay Men" (February 20, 2020 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/69536 69536-17357973@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, February 20, 2020 4:00pm
Location: Lane Hall
Organized By: Institute for Research on Women and Gender

Héctor Carrillo brings us into the lives of Mexican gay men who have left their home country to pursue greater sexual autonomy and sexual freedom in the United States. The groundbreaking ethnographic study brings our attention to the full arc of these men’s migration experiences, from their upbringing in Mexican cities and towns, to their cross-border journeys, to their incorporation into urban gay communities in American cities, and their sexual and romantic relationships with American men. These men’s diverse and fascinating stories demonstrate the intertwining of sexual, economic, and familial motivations for migration.

Professor Carrillo is the author of two books: The Night Is Young: Sexuality in Mexico in the Time of AIDS (University of Chicago Press, 2002), and Pathways of Desire: The Sexual Migration of Mexican Gay Men (University of Chicago Press, 2017). His current research investigates the sexualities of straight-identified men who are sexually interested in both women and men, as part of a larger project on the paradoxes of sexual identity as a social construction.

Carrillo serves as a member of the editorial boards of Sexuality Research and Social Policy, and Sexualidad, Salud y Sociedad: Revista Latinoamericana. He is a past chair of the Sociology of Sexualities Section of the American Sociological Association, and he served as co-chair of the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Science track of the XVII International AIDS Conference. He also has a history of involvement in HIV/AIDS community based organizations.

Presented by the Lesbian-Gay-Queer Research Initiative (LGQRI).

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Lecture / Discussion Wed, 19 Feb 2020 08:09:33 -0500 2020-02-20T16:00:00-05:00 2020-02-20T17:30:00-05:00 Lane Hall Institute for Research on Women and Gender Lecture / Discussion Héctor Carrillo, Professor, Northwestern University
Queer Kinship and Family Change in Taiwan (February 21, 2020 2:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/69538 69538-17357974@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, February 21, 2020 2:00pm
Location: Lane Hall
Organized By: Institute for Research on Women and Gender

Interweaving the narratives of multiple family members, including parents and siblings of her queer and trans informants, Amy Brainer analyzes the strategies that families use to navigate their internal differences. In Queer Kinship and Family Change in Taiwan, Brainer looks across generational cohorts for clues about how larger social, cultural, and political shifts have materialized in people’s everyday lives. Her findings bring light to new parenting and family discourses and enduring inequalities that shape the experiences of queer and heterosexual kin alike.

Brainer’s research takes her from political marches and support group meetings to family dinner tables in cities and small towns across Taiwan. She speaks with parents and siblings who vary in whether and to what extent they have made peace with having a queer or transgender family member, and queer and trans people who vary in what they hope for and expect from their families of origin. Across these diverse life stories, Brainer uses a feminist materialist framework to illuminate struggles for personal and sexual autonomy in the intimate context of family and home.

This event is part of IRWG's Gender: New Works, New Questions series, which spotlights recent publications by U-M faculty members and allows for deeper discussion by an interdisciplinary panel.

There will be an instant-win raffle at the beginning of the event for 5 free copies of the book! Must be present to win!

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Lecture / Discussion Tue, 04 Feb 2020 10:17:39 -0500 2020-02-21T14:00:00-05:00 2020-02-21T15:30:00-05:00 Lane Hall Institute for Research on Women and Gender Lecture / Discussion Queer Kinship and Family Change in Taiwan
Ovidian Transversions: ‘Iphis and Ianthe’, 1300-1650 (February 24, 2020 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/69539 69539-17357976@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, February 24, 2020 4:00pm
Location: Lane Hall
Organized By: Institute for Research on Women and Gender

-Peggy McCracken, Director, Institute for the Humanities; Mary Fair Croushore Professor of the Humanities; Professor of French, Women's Studies and Comparative Literature
-Valerie Traub, Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor of English and Women's Studies
-Basil Duffalo, Professor of Classical Studies; Affiliate Faculty, Department of Comparative Literature
-Yopie Prins, Chair, Department of Comparative Literature; Irene Butter Collegiate Professor of English and Comparative Literature

Panel discussion of “Ovidian Transversions: ‘Iphis and Ianthe’, 1300-1650,” Edited by Valerie Traub, Patricia Badir, Peggy McCracken

Medieval and early modern authors engaged with Ovid’s tale of ‘Iphis and Ianthe’ in a number of surprising ways. From Christian translations to secular retellings on the seventeenth-century stage, Ovid’s story of a girl’s miraculous transformation into a boy sparked a diversity of responses in English and French from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. In addition to analysing various translations and commentaries, the volume clusters essays around treatments of John Lyly’s Galatea (c. 1585) and Issac de Benserade’s Iphis et Iante (1637). As a whole, the volume addresses gender and transgender, sexuality and gallantry, anatomy and alchemy, fable and history, youth and pedagogy, language and climate change.

This event is part of IRWG's Gender: New Works, New Questions series, which spotlights recent publications by U-M faculty members and allows for deeper discussion by an interdisciplinary panel.

There will be an instant-win raffle at the beginning of the event for 5 free copies of the book! Must be present to win!

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Lecture / Discussion Wed, 19 Feb 2020 09:55:13 -0500 2020-02-24T16:00:00-05:00 2020-02-24T17:30:00-05:00 Lane Hall Institute for Research on Women and Gender Lecture / Discussion Ovidian Transversions
CANCELED -- Separated: Family and Community in the Aftermath of an Immigration Raid (March 12, 2020 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/69540 69540-17357977@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, March 12, 2020 3:00pm
Location: Lane Hall
Organized By: Institute for Research on Women and Gender

CANCELED: This event will be rescheduled for Fall 2020. Please stay tuned for details.


William Lopez, Emily Fredericks, and Matthew Lassiter discuss Lopez's recent book, Separated: Family and Community in the Aftermath of an Immigration Raid published by John Hopkins University Press in September 2019. This event is part of IRWG's Gender: New Works, New Questions series, which spotlights recent publications by U-M faculty members and allows for deeper discussion by an interdisciplinary panel.

There will be an instant-win raffle at the beginning of the event for 5 free copies of the book! Must be present to win!

About the book:

On a Thursday in November of 2013, Guadalupe Morales waited anxiously with her sister-in-law and their four small children. Every Latino man who drove away from their shared apartment above a small auto repair shop that day had failed to return—arrested, one by one, by ICE agents and local police. As the two women discussed what to do next, a SWAT team clad in body armor and carrying assault rifles stormed the room. As Guadalupe remembers it, "The soldiers came in the house. They knocked down doors. They threw gas. They had guns. We were two women with small children... The kids terrified, the kids screaming."

In Separated, William D. Lopez examines the lasting damage done by this daylong act of collaborative immigration enforcement in Washtenaw County, Michigan. Exploring the chaos of enforcement through the lens of community health, Lopez discusses deportation's rippling negative effects on families, communities, and individuals. Focusing on those left behind, Lopez reveals their efforts to cope with trauma, avoid homelessness, handle worsening health, and keep their families together as they attempt to deal with a deportation machine that is militarized, traumatic, implicitly racist, and profoundly violent.

Lopez uses this single home raid to show what immigration law enforcement looks like from the perspective of the people who actually experience it. Drawing on in-depth interviews with twenty-four individuals whose lives were changed that day in 2013, as well as field notes, records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, and his own experience as an activist, Lopez combines rigorous research with narrative storytelling. Putting faces and names to the numbers behind deportation statistics, Separated urges readers to move beyond sound bites and consider the human experience of mixed-status communities in the small everyday towns that dot the interior of the United States.

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Lecture / Discussion Wed, 11 Mar 2020 17:36:40 -0400 2020-03-12T15:00:00-04:00 2020-03-12T16:30:00-04:00 Lane Hall Institute for Research on Women and Gender Lecture / Discussion Separated: Family and Community in the Aftermath of an Immigration Raid
CANCELED/POSTPONED -- The Mothers of Gynecology: Examining U.S. Slavery and the Making of a Field (March 24, 2020 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/71643 71643-17851292@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, March 24, 2020 4:00pm
Location: Lane Hall
Organized By: Institute for Research on Women and Gender

This event has been canceled/postponed as of 3/12/2020. Please stay tuned for future updates.

Deirdre Cooper Owens is the Linda and Charles Wilson Professor in the History of Medicine and Director of the Humanities in Medicine program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is an Organization of American Historians’ (OAH) Distinguished Lecturer and has won a number of prestigious honors that range from the University of Virginia’s Carter G. Woodson Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies to serving as an American Congress of Obstetrics and Gynecology Fellow in Washington, D.C. Cooper Owens earned her Ph.D. from UCLA in History and wrote an award-winning dissertation while there. A popular public speaker, she has published articles, essays, book chapters, and think pieces on a number of issues that concern African American experiences and reproductive justice. Recently, Cooper Owens finished working with Teaching Tolerance and the Southern Poverty Law Center on a podcast series about how to teach U.S. slavery and Time Magazine listed her as an “acclaimed expert” on U.S. history in its annual “The 25 Moments From American History That Matter Right Now.” Her first book, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender and the Origins of American Gynecology (UGA Press, 2017) won the 2018 Darlene Clark Hine Book Award from the OAH as the best book written in African American women’s and gender history.

Professor Cooper Owens is also the Director of the Program in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia, the country’s oldest cultural institution founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1731. She is working on a second book project that examines mental illness during the era of United States slavery and is writing a popular biography of Harriet Tubman that examines her through the lens of disability.

This talk is presented by IRWG's program on Black Feminist Health Studies.

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Lecture / Discussion Thu, 12 Mar 2020 12:54:45 -0400 2020-03-24T16:00:00-04:00 2020-03-24T17:30:00-04:00 Lane Hall Institute for Research on Women and Gender Lecture / Discussion photo of Deirdre Cooper-Owens
CANCELED/POSTPONED -- Feminist Futures Roundtable (March 27, 2020 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/72735 72735-18068371@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, March 27, 2020 3:00pm
Location: Lane Hall
Organized By: Institute for Research on Women and Gender

This event has been canceled/postponed as of 3/12/2020. Please stay tuned for more details.

On the occasion of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender's 25th anniversary, this panel will reflect on the past and look ahead to the next quarter century, envisioning the future of feminist research. Panelists are encouraged to imagine what feminist scholarship will look like in their field: what are the future challenges and opportunities? What themes, methodologies, collaborations, or theoretical frameworks will emerge?

In "lightning round" style, panelists will discuss ideas that they’re most excited about in regards to feminist research. There will be time for a dynamic discussion with each other and the audience.

Refreshments and IRWG swag (t-shirts, buttons, stickers) provided!

Participants :
- Lisa Nakamura, Gwendolyn Calvert Baker Collegiate Professor, Department of American Culture; Director of the Digital Studies Institute
- Ava Purkiss, Assistant Professor, Departments of American Culture and Women's Studies
- LaVelle Ridley, Doctoral Candidate in English and Women's Studies
- Abby Stewart, Sandra Schwartz Tangri Distinguished University Professor of Psychology and Women's Studies; IRWG Founding Director

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Lecture / Discussion Thu, 12 Mar 2020 13:05:22 -0400 2020-03-27T15:00:00-04:00 2020-03-27T16:30:00-04:00 Lane Hall Institute for Research on Women and Gender Lecture / Discussion IRWG 25th anniversary logo