Anna Aizer  
Professor of Economics & Public Policy

Friday, October 13, 2017, 4:00 - 5:00 p.m.
Pembroke Hall 305

Vulnerable Families in the (Un)Changing Economy

Join the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women for a conversation with Professor Anna Aizer and Pembroke Center Associate Director and Director of Gender and Sexuality Studies, Drew Walker, about Professor Aizer's research on how gender and other issues of difference may influence labor, health and the intergenerational transmission of poverty.

This Family Weekend event is sponsored by the Pembroke Center Associates.
Free and open to the public. Handicapped accessible.

Seth Koven
G.E. Lessing Distinguished Professor of History and Poetics, Rutgers University

Tuesday, October 10, 2017, 5:30 p.m.
Pembroke Hall 305

Queer Conscience, Straight State in WWI Britain

Koven's talk focuses on one famously public-spirited gentry family, the Hobhouses, and the conscience of one man, Stephen Hobhouse, during WWI. Koven analyzes how, why and with what consequences Stephen Hobhouse’s mother, Margaret Potter Hobhouse, single-handedly orchestrated the war’s most successful campaign waged to save her oldest son Stephen, from a martyr’s death as an absolutist pacifist prisoner of conscience in 1917. Stephen's story reveals when and why the wartime state "queered" conscience and recasts the post-war disenfranchisement of conscientious objectors as an attempt to keep the state straight.

Koven's lecture supports our yearlong research seminar on "The Cultures of Pacifism."

The 2017-18 Pembroke Research Seminar, "The Cultures of Pacifism", is being led by Leela Gandhi, John Hawkes Professor of the Humanities and English.

The Pembroke Center invites applications from current Brown students, from any concentration or field, to apply for our research grants and internship. Undergraduate student grants are up to $1,000 and graduate student grants are up to $2,000.  Please apply using UFunds by Thursday, October 5, 2017.  Please see individual grant descriptions and guidelines.

Pembroke Center Postdoctoral Research Associate applications now being accepted.

The 2018-19 Pembroke Research Seminar, "What Are (Human) Rights? Imperial Origins, Curatorial Practices and Non-Imperial Ground" will be led by Ariella Azoulay, Professor of Comparative Literature and Modern Culture and Media.  

The Pembroke Center is very pleased to announce the creation of a new Graduate Certificate Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. The graduate certificate enables graduate students already enrolled in PhD programs at Brown to develop methodological and theoretical expertise and credentials in the interdisciplinary field of gender and sexuality studies while fulfilling the graduate requirements of their degree-granting department. It will give students the opportunity for advanced training in the field; provide them with specialized professional training in Gender and Sexuality Studies; and foster a community of scholars dedicated to the study of the intersections of gender and sexuality and other related methodologies, such as critical race studies, cultural studies, legal theory, psychoanalytic theory, as well as more traditional disciplinary methods.

The Pembroke Center is pleased to announce the appointment of AneekaAneeka Henderson Henderson as the 2017-18 Affiliated Scholar in Residence in the Black Feminist Theory Project. Launched in 2016-17, the new visiting scholar initiative invites a black feminist theorist to campus annually to contribute to the Pembroke Center's research and work with students, fellows, and faculty.

Professor Henderson is an assistant professor at Amherst College in the Sexuality, Women’s and Gender Studies department. She is a 2017-2018 AAUW American Postdoctoral Fellow and a 2017 Woodrow Wilson National Foundation Career Enhancement Fellow. At Amherst College, she teaches a wide range of courses exploring a mosaic of African American literature, art, music, and film, and her classes have been featured in Elle magazine as well as the New York Times.

During her tenure, she will present a talk from her forthcoming book project, Wedding Bell Blues: Race and the Modern Marriage Plot, which examines ways in which contemporary music, film, and fiction negotiate and respond to complex neoliberal logics and black political nostalgia privileging marriage and family as supposed "cures" for inequality.

Envisioned as a site of intellectual collaboration across disciplines, the aim of the the Black Feminist Theory Project is to enhance the visibility and accessibility of black feminist discourse on campus as a resource for faculty, students, and the surrounding community, while calling attention to ongoing activism and interventions at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and public policy.  Learn more about the project.