To mark our 40th anniversary celebrations, the Pembroke Center hosted a number of in-person, virtual, and hybrid events, enabling audiences to witness groundbreaking research in action while remaining as safe as possible. We launched the inaugural Pembroke Center Publics Initiative and Lecture Series, which brings to Brown pathbreaking artists and scholars whose work contends with issues of gender and sexuality in a transformative manner. We also convened highly successful and well-attended programs under the auspices of our new LGBTQIA+ Thinking initiative. 

Our Archives team launched two successful in-person exhibitions—one at Pembroke Hall titled “Hortense J. Spillers: A Life Recorded,” and another co-curated with the Providence Public Library called “Tomboy.” 

The COVID-19 pandemic had forced us to put a hold on several activities, including the awarding of faculty seed grants. Happily, this hiatus came to an end during the 2021–22 academic year. Please see the end of this report for more information about those projects.

In other projects, we are thrilled to inform you that the first ten years of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies have been digitized. This exciting development means that an electronic archive of issues published from 1989 to 1999 is now accessible to a broader audience. 

Academic year 2021-22 inaugurated new projects, public programs, and courses. It continued to present the challenge of balancing public health and the academic and educational mission of our center, and it was the first academic year at the center for me and Associate Director Wendy Allison Lee. This year, we produced more public facing programming in addition to the theoretical, speculative work for which the Pembroke Center is known. We are proud of what we accomplished, grateful for the support of our community, and looking forward to what 2022-23 brings.

-- Leela Gandhi, Shauna McKee Stark '76 P'10 Director of the Pembroke Center and John Hawkes Professor of the Humanities and English

Leela Gandhi's first year as Shauna McKee Stark ’76 P’10 Director of the Pembroke Center

John Hawkes Professor of the Humanities and English Leela Gandhi is a literary and cultural theorist whose research and teaching focus on transnational literatures, postcolonial theory and ethics, and the intellectual history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 2021-22 was her first year as Director. Some of her signature accomplishments this year included:

• Developing a comprehensive response to suggestions in the most recent external review of the center regarding workflow, administrative and advising structure, the Gender and Sexuality Studies Concentration and associated transparency considerations in due processes of the center. 
• Appointing a new Associate Director, Wendy Allison Lee. 
• In collaboration with the Dean of Faculty, establishing a new Faculty Steering Committee and a new Archives Advisory Board.  
• Redeveloping the Pembroke Center mission statement.
• Launching new initiatives:
  • The annual Pembroke Publics Lecture to showcase artists/thinkers who blend experimental thinking/practice with a commitment to social transformation. More about the inaugural event below. 
  • The LGBTQIA+ Thinking initiative under the directorship of Lynne Joyrich, Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown, devoted to the active production of knowledge generated from and about sexual and gender minorities. 
  • The Pembroke Public Health Collaborative. In June 2022 Sarah Gamble, Visiting Assistant Professor of the Practice of Gender Studies, joined the Pembroke Center for a three year pilot project to oversee our inaugural Public Health Collaborative Program. This program will tie in with curricular development in Public Health Humanities across our concentration. 
• Increasing the center’s focus on interdisciplinarity and intersectionality through the above initiatives as well as the upcoming Pembroke Seminar themes. 

Wendy Allison Lee’s First Year as Associate Director

Wendy Allison Lee, a scholar of Asian American literature and culture, as well as race and U.S. popular culture, joined the Pembroke Center as Associate Director in the fall of 2021. Lee plays a crucial role at the center, overseeing its overall programming alongside Leela Gandhi, the Shauna McKee Stark ’76, P’10 Director of the Pembroke Center, directing the undergraduate program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, and advising undergraduate students. In her first year, Lee worked to expand the Gender and Sexuality Studies (GNSS) course offerings, to foster a greater sense of community among students and faculty, and to strengthen connections between the undergraduate and graduate GNSS programs. Serving as Associate Director at the Pembroke Center is something of a homecoming for Lee, who earned her Ph.D. in English from Brown in 2012 and was a graduate student in the 2004-05 Pembroke Seminar “The Orders of Time,” led by Rey Chow.

Launching the Pembroke Publics Lecture Series

On April 27, 2022, writer, scholar, poet, and activist Alexis Pauline Gumbs delivered the inaugural talk of the Pembroke Center Publics Lecture Series. Gumbs describes herself as “a Queer Black Troublemaker and Black Feminist Love Evangelist.” As a writer, her feminist critical and creative practice includes poetry, fiction, experimental writing, and founding a number of inventive initiatives. Her talk, “Nutmeg and the Scale of Revolution: for Audre Lorde,” provided Gumbs an opportunity to share research from her forthcoming book, The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde.

Return to In-Person Work and Classes

2021-22 saw the return of in-person work, courses, and events. Center staff had to balance fluctuations in COVID-19 rates and the emergence of Omicron with the desire of many to return to fully in person teaching, work, and academic events. Technology was an invaluable tool for managing this. In particular, the Pembroke Center YouTube channel grew enormously in 2021-22 as a vehicle for making Pembroke events accessible to the widest possible audience. The center was able to host several events online as well as post recordings of in-person events, such as the inaugural Pembroke Publics Lecture by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, which has been viewed over a thousand times.

The opening of the Hortense J. Spillers exhibit

In April 2022, the Pembroke Center opened the exhibit “Hortense J. Spillers: A Life Recorded.” Hortense J. Spillers is an American literary critic and renowned Black feminist theorist. The exhibit, free and open to the public, highlights the personal and professional papers that Spillers donated to the Pembroke Center’s Feminist Theory Archive in the name of the Black Feminist Theory Project in 2019. It also encourages visitors to think critically about the construction of archives and archival collections. It runs through December 2022.

Launch of LGBTQIA+ Thinking initiative

A new program is the Pembroke Center’s LGBTQIA+ Thinking initiative, led by Lynne Joyrich, Professor of Modern Culture and Media. This project, which asks “How do we think with and about LGBTQIA+ subjects, communities, and histories?” includes programs, classroom and pedagogical collaborations, and scholarly community building. 2021-22 events included an artist talk with Jason Tranchida and Matthew Lawrence, creators of Headmaster, a queer art magazine; “Over the Rainbow: (Re)considering the Pride Flag(s),” a panel discussion;  and “Queer Spaces and Places,” a screening of LGBTQIA+ short films from across the globe presented with Magic Lantern Cinema. 

Pembroke Seminar: Color

In 2021-22, the senior faculty conveners of the Pembroke Seminar “Color” were Leslie Bostrom, Professor and Chair of the Brown Department of Visual Art, and Evelyn Lincoln, Professor and Chair of the Department of the History of Art and Architecture and Professor of Italian Studies. The seminar asked how global histories of race, gender, and class are connected to structures of knowledge and power that are ordered by color. Gathering a multidisciplinary group of scholars, Bostrom and Lincoln led seminar participants in a year-long examination of color as a social device that locates our place in the world through racial colorism, as well as a fundamental aspect of the production and experience of art. 

In addition to weekly seminar meetings led by Bostrom and Lincoln, participants heard from Bevil R. Conway, neuroscientist and artist, and Jinah Kim, George P. Bickford Professor of Indian and South Asian Art in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. 

2021-22 Seminar Faculty Fellows

In 2021-22, Edwin and Shirley Seave Faculty Fellows Stephen Bush, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Kevin Escudero, Assistant Professor of American Studies, along with Lambert Fund Fellow, and Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media Jinying Li, were able to advance their research projects and consider questions that add dimension to their teaching via their participation in the Pembroke Seminar, “Color.”  

Bush, Escudero, and Li consider the political aesthetics of color in their work, making participation in the Pembroke Seminar enormously helpful for furthering their research. During his time in the seminar, Bush worked on a book manuscript, entitled After Humanity: Political Life in Fragmented Times.  Escudero worked on his second book manuscript, Imperial Unsettling: Indigenous and Immigrant Activism towards Collective Liberation. And Li was able to work on her project, Synthesis, Animation, and the Production of Molecular Media in Modern China. 

2021-22 Seminar Graduate Student Fellows

Graduate fellows were Elise Bouley (French Studies) and Emily Simon (English). 

2021-22 Seminar Undergraduate Fellows

Undergraduate Fellows included Teresa Conchas, concentrator in International and Public Affairs and Latin American and Caribbean studies; Yara Doumani, concentrator in History and Environmental Studies; Kristen Marchetti, concentrator in History of Art and Architecture and Visual Art; Kavya Nayak, concentrator in International and Public Affairs and Behavioral Sciences; Nahdav Sapiro-Gheiler, who has an independent concentration in “The Body”; and Katherine Xiong, concentrator in Comparative Literature and Economics. 

2021-22 Seminar Postdoctoral Fellows

Postdoctoral Fellows were Erica Kanesaka, the Shauna M. Stark '76, P'10 Postdoctoral Fellow; Bernabe Mendoza, the Artemis A.W. and Martha Joukowsky Postdoctoral Fellow; and Allison Puglisi, the Carol G. Lederer Postdoctoral Fellow. In the fall of 2021, Kanesaka taught the GNSS course "Transpacific Femininities," using the term as a theoretical framework, archival method, and activist practice that places gender and sexuality at the center of Asian American literature, culture, and Pacific Rim geopolitics. In spring 2022, Mendoza taught the GNSS course "Women of Color Feminisms." This course investigated the constructs of race, gender, sexuality, and class from the standpoint of women of color feminist writers and thinkers. In the spring of 2022, Puglisi taught the GNSS course "Black on Earth: Race, Gender, and the Environment." This seminar operated on the notion that white supremacy and environmental degradation are historically related—and that Black Americans have long confronted the two together. 

The Postdoctoral Fellows, along with Visiting Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies Maria DeSimone, convened the Pembroke Seminar’s annual research roundtable. "Color Crossings: Race, Affect, Aesthetics” considered color’s metaphorical, linguistic, philosophical, historical, perceptual and practical resonances at the crossroads of critical race theory and color theory.

Student Research Grant and Prize Recipients

Graduate Student Grants and Prizes 

Steinhaus/Zisson Research Grants
Ieva Zumbyte, Sociology
“Place-based disparities in public childcare quality and how childcare caregivers understand their role and adapt childcare services according to neighborhood context in Chennai, India”

Radhika Moral, Anthropology
“Silk Frontiers: Weaving, Gendered Work, and the Politics of Belonging in Northeast India”

Stephanie Y. Wong, History
“Material culture of the early modern Spanish Pacific”

Pembroke Center Research Development Grant for Graduate Students 
Sara Colantuono, Italian Studies
“The Lonzi Paradox: Rethinking Lonzi’s Place in the Canon of Italian Feminist Thought”

Marie J. Langlois Dissertation Prize 
Melanie Y. White Ph.D. ’22 Africana Studies 
“What Dem Do To We No Have Name: Intimate Colonial Violence, Autonomy, and Black Women’s Art in Caribbean Nicaragua” 

Undergraduate Grants/Prizes

Barbara Anton Community Research Grant 
Sydney Smith ’22 Africana Studies, Political Science
“‘I Am a Revolutionary Black Woman’: Black Power Visions in the Narratives of Women in the Black Panther Party”

Enid Wilson Undergraduate Travel Fellowship 
Lily Willis ’22.5, Gender and Sexuality Studies, English 
“‘Expressing the Inexpressible,’ and Other Queer Sentiments: Language and Self in Contemporary Queer Memoir”

Helen Terry MacLeod Research Grant 
Emma Blake ’22, International Relations 
“Gender-based Violence and State-Sponsored Aggression: An Analysis of the Relationship Between Intimate Partner Violence and State Militarization”

Ruth Simmons Prize in Gender and Women’s Studies
Linda Pei Undergraduate Research Grant
Jamila Beesley ’22 American Studies, International and Public Affairs
“The Architects of the Solutions They Need: Dalit Feminism in the U.S. Caste Abolition Movement” 

Honorable Mention: Lillian Pickett ’22 American Studies
“(En)gendering Violence, Imagining Safety: Carceral Politics in Rhode Island’s Feminist Movement, 1970-2009” 

Joan Wallach Scott Prize 
Sabrina Bajwa ’21.5 Gender and Sexuality Studies, Hispanic Literatures and Cultures 
“Fortifying the Boundaries of Citizenship through the Simultaneous Rhetoric of Anti-Birth and Anti-Abortion: Reproductive Injustice as a Tool of Immigration Enforcement” 

In 2021-22, Gender and Sexuality Studies (GNSS) faculty taught 18 undergraduate and graduate courses. 215 undergraduates from across the university took a GNSS course.  

Undergraduate Concentration

Three students graduated from the GNSS concentration: Sabrina Bajwa ’21.5 (honors), Sara Bermudez ’22, and Laurel McIntyre ’22. During Commencement Weekend, GNSS hosted its first in-person departmental ceremony since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Graduate Certificate Program 

In May 2022, there were 19 students in the program from 13 disciplines, including American Studies, Art and Architecture, Comparative Literature, English, French, German, History, Italian, Modern Culture and Media, Musicology, Philosophy, Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, Religious Studies, and Sociology. 

Three graduated:

• Eleanor Rowe-Stefanik is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in English at Brown University.
• Arianna Falbo is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Bentley University in Massachusetts.
• Margaret Unverzagt Goddard is in the first year of a two-year postdoctoral fellowship in American Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Landmark Collections: the Fernández/Abu-Jamal Acquisitions

A central focus of the Pembroke Center is to preserve the papers of Brown University women through our archive. We believe that by collecting women’s stories, a richer understanding of history might emerge. Our goal is to gather archival collections that create a stronger foundation upon which new, feminist knowledge might be created. 

Guided by this important mission, we completed the acquisition of two landmark collections through the Pembroke Center Archive and on behalf of the John Hay Library; the papers of Johanna Fernández ‘93 and those of her friend, Mumia Abu-Jamal. 

Thanks to the Pembroke Center Oral History Project, Advisory Council member Fernández reached out to document her COVID-19 experience in 2020. Through this oral history interview, it became clear that Fernández held a trove of important archival papers documenting her life as a scholar and activist. We hoped she might be interested in contributing them to the archive, and she was.

These conversations also revealed another story. In addition to her own collection, Fernández held the papers of the political activist and prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal. The collections were located together in Fernández’s home in New York and document her life and work as a Brown alumna, Dominican American student activist, scholar of U.S. history and the Young Lords Party, and a leading prisoner advocate for Abu-Jamal. Abu-Jamal’s papers document his experience as a community organizer, journalist, and incarcerated person once referred to as the “most famous man on death row.” Abu-Jamal earned this title by publicly pleading his innocence and fighting his conviction for the killing of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner in 1981. Abu-Jamal has remained imprisoned for 41 years. 

For over two years, we worked to build a relationship with Fernández and Abu-Jamal. We also fought to preserve that hard-won trust while working for the approval of and in cooperation with Brown leadership to secure the deal. It was a herculean effort and singular within an institution of higher education in the United States. Never before has a university library system acquired the papers of a currently imprisoned person. 

Through this experience, the Pembroke Center had the opportunity to lead among our Ivy League peers by curating these historic collections. In doing so, we built upon Brown’s Slavery & Justice commitments, the work of Brown’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America’s Mass Incarceration Lab, and our own mission. We also strengthened peer excellence in light of the Angela Davis papers held at Harvard University, the Black Panther Party Collection at Cornell University, and the Damien Echols diaries at Yale University. 

New Collections Available for Research

• Feminist Theory Archive
  • Ann duCille papers (addenda)
  • Anne Fausto-Sterling papers (addenda)
  • Silvia Federici papers (addenda)
  • Alison M. Jaggar papers (addenda)
  • Caren Kaplan papers (new)
  • Nancy K. Miller papers (addenda)
  • Keisha-Khan Y. Perry papers (new)
  • Joan Scott papers (new)
  • Judith Walkowitz papers (addenda)
• Christine Dunlap Farnham Archive
  • Maylun Buck-Lew papers (new, restricted)
  • COYOTE Rhode Island additional records (addenda)
  • Catherine Gund papers (reprocessed)
  • Miriam Dale Pichey papers (reprocessed)
  • Womxn Project records (addenda)

Oral History Project 

Between July 2021 and June 2022, archives staff recorded 11 oral histories and made 12 oral histories available to stream online. These include histories related to COVID-19, women in the military, Title IX, and more. A highlight was the group oral history Assistant Archivist Amanda Knox conducted with Amy Cohen ‘92, Lisa Stern Kaplowitz ‘95, and Jennifer Hsu Todd ‘95, plaintiffs in the Title IX case, Cohen et. al. v. Brown University.

“...Our focus was preserving the gymnastics team and preserving opportunities for women at Brown. But the case became so much bigger and came to represent so much more and with such, in a positive way. I mean I wish I could say we set out to kind of you know, push universities and high schools around the country to increase their opportunities for women, but, but that wasn’t really the case. But it was this amazing unintended consequence…”
- Amy Cohen ‘92

• Wanni Anderson, class of 1962
• Rachel Cassidy, faculty
• Amy Cohen, class of 1992, Lisa Stern Kaplowitz, class of 1995, and Jennifer Hsu Todd, class of 1995 (group interview)
• Mitchell Foster, staff
• Susan Friedman, class of 1970
• Kathy Le, class of 1997
• Miranda Summers Lowe, class of 2009 MA
• Yoruba Richen, class of 1994
• Charise Castro Smith, class of 2005
• Elizabeth West, class of 1973
• 25th reunion, class of 1997
• 50th reunion, class of 1972

Archives Curatorial Proctorships 21-22

Esteem Brumfield, Spring 2022 Graduate Curatorial Proctor, Voices of Mass Incarceration Special Project 
In 2022, Brumfield completed a masters degree at the School of Public Health. During his time at Brown, he served as Research Director of CSREA’s Mass Incarceration Lab. As the Pembroke Center Archives continues its curatorial work associated with in-coming collections relating to gender and the carceral state, Brumfield joined the team to share his scholarship, provide advice and work as a field assistant with the Archives team and our donors of collections.

Brumfield’s research focuses on the health care needs of imprisoned and formerly imprisoned individuals. He is particularly interested in the intersection of health and criminal justice reform and in efforts to improve community health and reverse mass incarceration. 

N'Kosi Oates, 2021-22 Graduate Curatorial Proctor, Black Feminist Theory Project
N’Kosi Oates completed his Ph.D. in Africana Studies in 2022. His research engaged African American culture, aesthetics, literature, and social history from Reconstruction to the 1980s. His work has been published in the National Review of Black Politics, Journal of Africana Religions, and Black Perspectives. He was also a Cogut Mellon Fellow with the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown. 

Oates trained with the Nancy L. Buc ’65 LLD’94 hon Pembroke Center Archivist, learning the myriad skills involved with curatorial work. Oates identified potential donors, wrote donor solicitation letters, traveled with archives staff, completed field work with potential donors, created survey reports, made presentations to the Hay Library Acquisitions Committee, and assisted in archival instructional sessions for Brown University classes. 

Collaboration with the John Hay Library

The Pembroke Center Archives’ collaborative relationship with the Hay Library is critical in helping to inform the Hay's collection development policy; tapping into the library’s purchasing power; caring for Pembroke Center Archives collections; and familiarizing library staff about Pembroke Center Archives collections for researcher use.

Recent examples of the mutually beneficial relationship include: 

• Textiles from The Womxn Project collection, including handmaid cloaks and the petition quilt, are cared for by the Brown Library's conservation team led by Michelle Venditelli, at no cost to the Pembroke Center Archives. 
• Murphy sat on the Collection Development committee and proposed the nomenclature for two of the main collecting themes the library eventually adopted - "Global Lavender Voices" and the "Power" component of "Ideology and Power"
• The Hortense J. Spillers collection is one of the most heavily used special collections at the Hay Library - a collection that would not exist at Brown without the curatorial work of the Pembroke Center Archives. 

Instructional Sessions

The Pembroke Center Archives lead instructional sessions with Brown students, helping undergraduate and graduate students learn about the incredible resources within the archives, and boosting their understanding of the archives and archival curation. This year, the archivists hosted 13 instructional sessions with a total of 97 students.  The sessions were held with:

• AFRI 2040: Introduction to Black Women's Studies
• AMST 0191E: Objects as Texts: Materializing Race, Gender, and Sexuality
• AMST 1200A: Scraps of the Archive
• AMST 1906X: Black Queer Life
• ENGL 1190C: Advanced Creative Nonfiction: Biography
• GNSS 0710: Feminist Digitial Humanities
• GNSS 1990: Gender and Sexuality Studies Senior Seminar
• HMAN 1975G: Planning the Family: Gender, Reproduction, and the Politics of Choice
• No course code available: Historical Methods Module
• TAPS 1330: Dance History: The 20th Century

Some courses received multiple sessions.

Black Feminist Theory Project

Envisioned as a site of intellectual collaboration across disciplines, The Black Feminist Theory Project is anchored by rotating Distinguished Professorships/Affiliated Scholars in Residence at the Pembroke Center. Other features include annual lectures and archives contributed by notable theorists to the Pembroke Center's Feminist Theory Archive in the name of the Black Feminist Theory Project. The aim of the 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.

Scholar
Jallicia Jolly, 2021-22 Affiliated Scholar, Black Feminist Theory Project, Visiting Scholar in Gender Studies

Jolly is Assistant Professor in American Studies and Black Studies at Amherst College where her research focuses on the transnational politics of race, gender, sexuality and reproductive justice throughout the African diaspora. Jolly researches and teaches on Black women's health and activism, reproductive justice and health inequities, and intersectionality and HIV/AIDS in the U.S. and Caribbean. Jolly holds a PhD from the University of Michigan and a BA from Williams College.

New Collections
The Hazel V. Carby papers consist of the personal and professional papers of Hazel Carby, Charles C. and Dorothea S. Dilley Professor Emeritus of African American Studies and Professor Emeritus of American Studies, Yale University. Carby’s foundational and extensive scholarship focuses on race, gender, class, African American Studies, and African Diaspora Studies. Materials in this collection include correspondence, administrative documents, conference files, teaching materials, lecture, essay, and book drafts, handwritten research notes, research materials, and print materials, dating 1972-2016.

The Keisha-Khan Y. Perry papers contain the personal and professional papers of Keisha-Khan Y. Perry, scholar of race, gender, and politics in the Americas with a particular focus on Black women's activism, urban geography and questions of citizenship, feminist theories, intellectual history and disciplinary formations. Materials include notebooks, correspondence, conference materials, draft writings, and print material, dating from 1981 to 2021.

Hortense J. Spillers: A Life Recorded Exhibit
April 27-December 21, 2022

The center curated this exhibit to celebrate the acquisition of the Hortense J. Spillers papers by the Pembroke Center Archives for the Black Feminist Theory Project in 2019. 

Hortense J. Spillers is an American literary critic and renowned Black feminist theorist. This exhibit highlights the personal and professional papers that Spillers donated, and encourages visitors to think critically about the construction of archives and archival collections.

Visitors see archival items that document Spillers’s professional life as well as the interests and projects she pursued in her personal time. Highlights include: a typed and annotated 1985 draft of Spillers’s landmark essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book;” a personal diary where Spillers recorded her response to the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy; her handwritten talk about her experience as a Black professor during the 1970s; an unpublished work of her original fiction; correspondence from Toni Morrison; and much more.

Digitization of differences

In the 2021–22 academic year, the first ten years of differences were digitized and made available online for full-text downloads. The journal continued to reach readers in the thousands: more than 31,000 users accessed journal content online from October 2021 to September 2022.

Volume 32.2 (Sept. 2021)

The September 2021 open issue of differences featured vital work on a range of timely themes, from the anti-intellectualism pervading the “post-critique” movement to the ways “adjudicative readings” of sexual violence in literature replicate the prejudices inherent in historical rape law. Contributors to this issue include scholars who have participated in the academic life of the Pembroke Center: Dominik Zechner, who wrote on the mutual exclusivity of promising and its forgetting in Nietzsche and beyond, was Artemis A. W. and Martha Joukowsky Postdoctoral Fellow in 2019–20, while Rijuta Mehta, whose article about breaking with the rigid telos of “successful” revolutionary ends in the context of anticolonial movements has been internationally recognized, was a graduate student recipient of a Steinhaus/Zisson Pembroke Center Research Grant in 2014–15. 

Table of Contents: 

• Corey McEleney, “The Resistance to Overanalysis"
• Rijuta Mehta, “Protest without End”
• Sara-Maria Sorentino, “Mistresses as Masters? The Textual Pleasures of the Plantation Present”
• Dominik Zechner, “The Promise of Oblivion: A Rhetorical Predicament in Sacher-Masoch, Nietzsche, and Beyond”
• Erin Spampinato, “Rereading Rape in the Critical Canon: Adjudicative Criticism and the Capacious Conception of Rape”

Volume 32.3 (Dec. 2021)

Articles included in this open issue analyze the gendered and racialized structures of power inherent to various technologies of knowledge, including those of state surveillance and capture, mathematical algorithms, and psychological case studies. Hannah Zeavin’s article on metaphors of temperature in mid-century pediatric psychology studies was the recipient of both the Disability History Association's 2021 Annual Outstanding Article/Chapter Award and the inaugural Timothy Shary prize for Best Essay Published in Children’s and Youth Media from The Society for Cinema and Media Studies. 

Table of Contents:

• Alexander R. Galloway, “The Gender of Math”
• Michael Dango, “Policing (as) the Paradigmatic Scene of Rape”
• Hannah Zeavin, “Hot and Cool Mothers”
• Andrés Fabián Henao Castro, “Ontological Captivity: Toward a Black Radical Deconstruction of Being”
• Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf, “Conundrums in the House of Wailing: Some Scenarios from Sudanese Widows”

Volume 33.1 (May 2022)

Several of the articles collected in this open issue were written by junior scholars exploring queer boyhood and masculinities in film, literature, and socio-political discourse. This cluster includes work on touch and Black queer embodied expression in Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight (2019), masculine subjectivity and knowledge/power in the ancient Greek novel Daphnis and Chloe by Longus, and the discursive labyrinth navigated by queer Iranian asylum seekers interviewed by UNHCR officers. 

Table of Contents: 

• Dionte Harris, “The Smear: Vibrational Flesh and the Calculus of Black Queer Becoming in Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight”
• Jinying Li, “Toward a Genealogy of the Wall-Screen”
• Patricia Stuelke, “Reparative Reading and the Drug Wars’ Queer Children”
• Emily Waller, “Gender Constitution and Reversible Potentiality: The Making of the Masculine Subject in Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe”
• Emrah Yildiz, “Migrant Sexualities, Queer Travelers: Iranian Bears and the Asylum of Translation in Turkey”

Since its founding, the Pembroke Center has enjoyed and been strengthened by the advice, support, and engagement of its broad and dedicated community of alumnae/i and friends. The many ways this community participates in the work of the center have enhanced our ability to carry out our intellectual mission and public humanities programming, and to enlarge conversations about gender and difference in a way that trains a keen eye on the historical record while opening up possibilities for the future.

The support of the Friends of the Pembroke Center manifests every day in classrooms, conversations and research projects, in public programming and broader conversations, in the archives, and the publications that Pembroke Center scholars produce. While this year posed challenges to in-person events, the Friends were able to support numerous virtual events in collaboration with other university partners. More than 250 participants attended these events over the course of the year.

We were deeply saddened by the loss of two members of our community this year: Martha Sharp Joukowsky ’58 PhB’82 hon. LHD’85 hon., and Susan Adler Kaplan ’58 MAT’65.

Pembroke Center Advisory Council 2021-22 

Anne Buehl ’88, Chair 

Sophie Waskow Rifkin ’07, Vice-Chair 

Members 

Pamela Arya ’84, P’18 

Bernicestine McLeod Bailey ’68, P’99 ’03 

Emily Coe-Sullivan ’99 

Marcia R. Ely ’80 

Johanna Fernández ’93 

Yvonne P. Goldsberry ’82 

Ryan G. W. Grubbs ’10 

Ulle Holt A.M. ’92, Ph.D. ’00, P’93 ’02 

Ellen Hunter ’04 

Barbara Dugan Johnson ’83, P’16 

Carol M. Lemlein ’67, P’90 

Joan Hoost McMaster ’60 

Kaitlyn Murphy ’04 

Leslie Newman ’75, A.M. ’75, P’08 ’16 

Lorine Pendleton ’91 

Gwenn Masterman Snider ’83, P’13 

Leah Sprague ’66 

Shauna M. Stark ’76, P’10 

Kimberly Wachtler Steinman ’13 

Irene Sudac ’81, P’17 

Judith Surkis ’92 

Leora Tanenbaum ’91 

Donna Zaccaro ’83, P’19 

Ex Officio 

Nancy L. Buc ’65 LLD’94 hon. 

Joan MacLeod Heminway ’83 

Jean Howard ’70 LHD’16 hon. 

Anne Jones Mills ’60 

Diane Lake Northrop ’54, P’81, GP’13 ’16 

Eileen Rudden ’72, P’03 ’07 ’11 

Phyllis K. Santry ’66 

Elizabeth Munves Sherman ’77, P’06 ’09 

Anita Spivey ’74, P’09 

Mary A. Vascellaro ’74, P’07 

Jasmine Waddell ’99 

Victoria Westhead ’83, P’17 ’19 

Beverly H. Zweiman ’66, P’01

Responding to fluctuating COVID-19 rates and with the health and safety of the Pembroke community as our top concern, the Pembroke Center hosted in person and online events in 2021-22.

Pembroke Seminar “Color” Lecture
Color Coded: in Neuroscience and Culture
10/5/21

Bevil R. Conway, neuroscientist and artist, examined the dogma that color vision plays a modest role in encoding and recognizing objects, and used arguments from neuroscience, culture, and personal history to argue that color plays a fundamental role in perception and cognition. This talk was sponsored by the Marshall Woods Lectureships Foundation of Fine Arts and was given in conjunction with the 2021-22 Pembroke Seminar, "Color."

Headmaster Magazine Artist Talk with Creators Jason Tranchida and Matthew Lawrence
10/13/21

Headmaster is the “art magazine for man-lovers.” The magazine’s editors write assignments for artists who then create original projects for each issue. Headmaster No. 9 – The Collaboration Issue – featured projects by seven artist duos, one musical duo, two writer/translators, and one drag house (House of Rice, Vancouver’s only all-Asian drag collective). This conversation was facilitated by Modern Culture and Media Professor Lynne Joyrich.
Co-sponsor: Brown Arts Institute 
HeadmasterNo9 was produced with support from the City of Providence Department of Art, Culture + Tourism.

Women in Washington: Leading in Times of Crisis
12/9/21

As part of the 130 Years of Women at Brown celebration, the Brown Women’s Network hosted  nearly 150 virtual attendees for an event with Suzanne Goldberg '85, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Strategic Operations and Outreach, U.S. Office for Civil Rights and Taryn Williams '02, Assistant Secretary of Disability Employment Policy, U.S. Department of Labor. This event was co-sponsored by the Friends of the Pembroke Center.  In a discussion moderated by Susan Moffitt, Associate Professor of Political Science and International and Public Affairs at Brown, the pair discussed the critical role that women play in Washington, as well as what it means to be pursuing issues of civil rights and labor equity during a time of such intense political division. 
Co-sponsors: Pembroke Center, Watson Institute

Perfect Storm: Women, Work, and the COVID-19 Pandemic
12/14/21

Presented by the Friends of the Pembroke Center and the Pembroke Center Advisory Council, this panel asked: What have the fault lines that COVID laid bare revealed about women, labor, class and justice? How can our society move toward solutions to the longstanding inequities that put women so at risk, and what can be done today, to improve conditions for tomorrow?
The panel was moderated by Alissa Quart ’94, Executive Director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, author, and journalist. It featured Karen Dynan ’85, Professor of the Practice, Department of Economics and Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University; and Andrea M. O’Neal ’03, institutional equity & economic justice advocate.
Co-sponsor: Brown Women’s Network

Over the Rainbow: (Re)Considering the Pride Flag(s) 
3/1/22

The Pembroke Center’s LGBTQIA+ Thinking initiative presented this virtual panel discussion among artists, scholars, cultural critics, educators and members of the public that examined the popularization and symbolic use of the original rainbow pride flag as well as subsequent iterations of and alternatives to it. The discussion was moderated by Lynne Joyrich, Professor of Modern Culture and Media and director of the initiative. It featured panelists Liz Collins, multimedia artist; Michelle Millar Fisher, Ronald C. and Anita L. Wornick Curator of Contemporary Decorative Arts, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Alex Verman Green, writer, cultural critic, political theorist, and law student; and Ivan Ramos, assistant professor of Theater Arts and Performance Studies at Brown.
Supported by: the Friends of the Pembroke Center

Pembroke Seminar “Color” Lecture
Color Coding Knowledge: Five Colors of Indian Esoteric Buddhism
3/15/22

Jinah Kim, Professor of South and Southeast Asian art at Harvard University, explored how those in Indian esoteric Buddhist communities used color as a tool to organize the vast visual information generated in tantric vision practices. This talk was given in conjunction with the 2021-22 Pembroke Seminar, "Color."
Co-sponsors: the Marshall Woods Lectureships Foundation of Fine Arts, the Center for the Study of the Early Modern World

Queer Spaces and Places: Global LGBTQIA+ Short Films
3/21/22 

This live screening at the Granoff Center was presented by Magic Lantern Cinema as part of the LGBTQIA+ Thinking initiative. It featured eight works from around the globe that highlight diverse stories, experiences and identities. All of the shorts were created in the past few years and by emerging filmmakers. Many of the films not only push boundaries around queer subjectivity, but also experiment with cinematic form and narrative techniques.

The Trafficking Deportation Pipeline: Asian Massage Work and the Policing of Racialized Poverty
3/24/22

This year’s annual Elizabeth Munves Sherman '77, P'06, P'09 Lecture in Gender and Sexuality Studies featured Professor Elena Shih, Manning Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown. This in-person talk also reflected on the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings.

Nutmeg and the Scale of Revolution: for Audre Lorde
4/27/22

Alexis Pauline Gumbs gave the talk "Nutmeg and the Scale of Revolution: for Audre Lorde" as the Pembroke Center’s Inaugural Pembroke Publics lecture. The Pembroke Center Publics Initiative and Lecture Series is a new initiative designed to bring to Brown guests whose work in any sphere—from academics to activism and well beyond— contends with issues of gender and sexuality in a transformative manner. This series was developed by center Director Leela Gandhi.

Gumbs, who describes herself as a Queer Black Troublemaker and Black Feminist Love Evangelist, is a writer whose feminist critical and creative practice includes poetry, fiction, experimental writing, and founding a number of inventive initiatives. 

Tomboy Exhibit and What Does Tomboy Mean to You? Webinar
Exhibit: 4/1/22-6/30/22
Webinar: 5/4/22

Appearing first in the 1590s, the term “tomboy” was defined as a “wild, romping girl, who acts like a spirited boy” or a “strumpet, bold and immodest woman.” Co-curated with the Providence Public Library, this exhibition interrogated the history of cultural expectations and gender norms for girls and women, especially in the interplay between lifestyle, aesthetic, play and self-identity.
What Does Tomboy Mean to You? was a recorded webinar created to complement the exhibit, featuring performance artist and “gender outlaw” Kate Bornstein ’69 in conversation with gender and sexuality studies scholar Virginia Thomas A.M.’16, Ph.D.’20, and artist and PPL Events and Program Manager Janaya Kizzie. The discussion aimed to move beyond stereotypes of the tomboy and called upon panelists to share their personal experiences related to the idea of tomboy and how the label affected their own identities. 
Co-sponsored by: Providence Public Library
Supported by: The Friends of the Pembroke Center

Color Crossings: Race, Affect, Aesthetics
4/22/22-4/23/22

Postdoctoral Fellows Erica Kanesaka, Bernabe Mendoza, and Allison Puglisi, along with Visiting Scholar Maria De Simone, convened top interdisciplinary scholars for a two day symposium. The symposium was the annual research event organized by the Fellows in concert with the Pembroke Seminar theme. It opened with a well-attended in-person artist/scholar talk and proceeded with a series of panels that examined the work of artists, writers and other creators of color and explored how their art engages color’s aesthetic and political implications.

A Faculty Spotlight Conversation Featuring Professor Lynne Joyrich
5/18/22

The center co-sponsored this Brown Women’s Network event spotlighting Lynne Joyrich, Professor of Modern Culture and Media, and director of the LGBTQIA+ Thinking initiative. Attendees learned about her research on the construction of gender and sexuality in contemporary media. 

Reflecting on Title IX at 50: Women Athletes and Their Lives at Brown and Beyond 
5/28/22

Marking the 50th anniversary year of Title IX, a panel of Brown alumni and friends shared their experiences, explored the influence of sports in the lives of women and girls, and recognized the progress and continuing fight for equality for women in sports. This forum marked 130 years of women at Brown and the 40th anniversary of the Pembroke Center.

The panel was moderated by M. Grace Calhoun '92, P'26, Vice President for Athletics and Recreation at Brown. Panelists included: Katie Guay '05, Olympic ice hockey referee and first female official in the American Hockey League; Dawn Chuck Kane '02, two-time Olympian (Jamaica) and Director of Student-Athlete Development, Duke University; and Carolan Norris, former Senior Associate Athletic Director and Senior Women's Administrator, Brown University.

Co-sponsors: the Brown Women’s Network, the Brown Sports Foundation

C.O.M.P.A.S.S. Project

A 2022 Interdisciplinary Faculty Seed Grant project, The C.O.M.P.A.S.S. Project (Centering our (Mother)MC’s Productions, Artistry, Stories + Sounds) is led by Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo, a Mellon Gateway Postdoctoral Fellow in Music. The C.O.M.P.A.S.S. Project is a one-year digital humanities exploration of the visual and sonic possibilities for collecting, organizing, and presenting oral testimonies of women and girls who rap, DJ, and make beats. The project aims to address the erasure of women and girls from popular and scholarly accounts of hip hop artistry and present a rich counter-narrative devised from careful documentation of their life stories and recorded works. The C.O.M.P.A.S.S. Project will culminate in a public gathering, live music performance, and presentation in Spring 2023.

Politics of the Prescription Pad: Pain Pharmacology as a Cultural Process

A 2022 Interdisciplinary Faculty Seed Grant project, this initiative is led by William Page, Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine at Brown; Kim Adams, American Council of Learned Societies Emerging Voices Fellow, Stanford University; Fred Schiffman, Sigal Family Professor of Humanistic Medicine, Professor of Medicine; and Sarah Williams, Louise Lamphere Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Brown. This research group hosts a journal club and lecture series bringing together humanists, special scientists, and allied health professionals. 
Faculty members involved in this project seek to investigate how the treatment of pain is equally embedded in the social, economic, and political contexts that shape individual experiences of illness and institutional structures of care. With efforts to reduce opiate prescription alongside documented bias in prescription rates, there is a renewed urgency to understand pain pharmacology across historical, spatial, and cultural borders. 

Working Group on Gender and Justice

The center hosted the newly formed Interdisciplinary Working Group on Gender and Justice, a research initiative designed to offer early career scholars a forum for professional development including presenting and receiving feedback on early-stage article drafts, manuscript chapters, grant applications, and job market materials. Initiated by Sonia Rupcic, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Population Studies and Training Center, and Esha Sraboni, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology, the group brought together researchers from the disciplines of sociology, economics, psychology, anthropology, geography and religious studies whose work addresses gendered violence, incarceration, religion, and extra-legal forms of justice. One highlight of these meetings is that they inspired a collaboration between two participants (a psychologist and an anthropologist) to work on a research publication about the politics of anger-management interventions.