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 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.

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded a 2017 fellowship to Pembroke Center Director Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg to support her book project “Grounds for Reclamation,” an exploration of how land reclamation projects in the 1930s helped generate public support for Benito Mussolini’s regime. Applicants were elected on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise from a pool of nearly 3,000. Stewart-Steinberg was one of 173 awardees in this year's competition, and one of only five scholars selected in the field of European & Latin American History.

From September 14, 2017 until the end of the semester, Ariella Azoulay, Professor of Comparative Literature and Modern Culture and Media, along with Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, Leigh Raiford, Laura Wexler and others, will mount the exhibit Co-lab(oration) in Pembroke Hall.  Co-lab(oration) is a pedagogical and curatorial experiment based on an ongoing exploration of photography as a form of collaboration.

How We Should Respond to Photographs of Suffering

Renty, a man taken from the Congo, in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1850. Photograph by J. T. Zealy / Wikimedia CommonsRead a recent New Yorker article by Sarah Sentilles about the Azoulay's research.

Saturday, May 27, 2017 
11:00 am
Room 120, List Art Building
64 College Street, Providence

Join Brown alumnae in a conversation about the challenges and opportunities for women in entrepreneurship, and learn about their personal and professional journeys as leaders and launchers. How does gender shape entrepreneurial choices, support, access to capital, and innovation? What does entrepreneurship mean to women in today's world?

Moderator: 
Deb Mills-Scofield ’82, Founder, Mills-Scofield, LLC

Panelists:

Morra Aarons-Mele ’98, Founder, Women Online, & Author, Hiding in the Bathroom: An Introvert's Roadmap to Getting Out There (When You'd Rather Stay Home)

Sarah Carson ’02, Founder/CEO, Leota New York

Sadie Kurzban ’12, Founder, 305 Fitness

Vibha Pinglé, AM’90 PhD’96, President and Founder, Ubuntu at Work; Adjunct Lecturer, International and Public Affairs, Brown University

This exhibit was remounted for the Women's Leadership Council's 125 Years of Women at Brown Conference and will be on view on the first floor of Pembroke Hall through Commencement Weekend 2017. 

On display at Pembroke Hall, 172 Meeting Street, Providence

Building hours are Monday through Friday, 8:30 am - 5:00 pm
*With additional hours for Commencement:
Saturday, May 27, 8:30 am - 5:00 pm

This Pembroke Center exhibit explores in detail the Lamphere case and its consequences for Brown. Based on extensive archival research and oral histories with key participants, the exhibit paints a vivid picture of why and how Brown changed during a key moment in its history and of the feminist activism that drove that change.