Another delight of in-person gathering is, of course, more opportunities to be in academic community with students. Graduate students affiliated with the Pembroke Center had a particularly active year. They organized “The Nicknames of Distortion: A Hortense Spillers symposium,” enrolled in high numbers in our graduate certificate program, were fellows in the Pembroke Seminar, proctored for differences, and served as teaching assistants in the Introduction to Gender and Sexuality Studies course.

The Center has benefitted in many ways from the continued dedication and engagement of our graduate students. Undergraduates were able to take advantage of new opportunities, too. Sarah Williams, Louise Lamphere Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies, taught “Reproductive In/Justice;” the course included the opportunity for students to receive doula training through the organization Mama Glow. Four undergraduate fellows participated in the Pembroke Seminar, and two undergraduate student co-leaders Angelina Cho ’24 and Kellie Willhite ’24 reignited the GNSS DUG, hosting several successful events.

In late spring, Debbie Weinstein, Associate Professor of American Studies, accepted our invitation to serve as Interim Director of the Pembroke Center for 2023-24. In addition to her distinguished career as a historian of modern science and medicine, longtime supporters of the Center may recall that Professor Weinstein served as director of the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program and associate director of the Pembroke Center prior to joining the department of American Studies. As I embark upon my sabbatical, I am grateful for her leadership and the support of the Pembroke community.

-- Leela Gandhi, Shauna McKee Stark ’76 P’10 Director of the Pembroke Center

Celebrating and Preserving the Work of Hortense Spillers

In 2022, graduate students Tara Holman, Christopher Lasasso, Kiran Saili, and Semilore Sobande brought the idea of a symposium celebrating the work and life of Black feminist theorist and scholar Hortense J. Spillers and the 2022 Pembroke Center exhibit “Hortense Spillers: A Life Recorded.”

The two-day event, organized by the students with the support of the Center, featured participation from Spillers, as well as a keynote lecture from C. Riley Snorton (University of Chicago) and a conversation between Spillers and Margo Natalie Crawford (University of Pennsylvania). 

Pembroke archivists also made a collecting trip to Spillers’s home in Nashville, TN, in the spring to bring additional material to her papers already stored at the John Hay Library. Archivists met with Spillers and assisted with identifying and sorting collection items. These included photographs from her childhood and those documenting kinship, unpublished writings, diaries, and course material from classes taught by Spillers.

The First Year of the Public Health Collaborative

2022-23 was the inaugural year of the Pembroke Public Health Collaborative, an interdisciplinary project providing opportunities for students and faculty to explore the intersections of public health and gender and sexuality studies. The project is led by Visiting Assistant Professor of the Practice of Gender and Sexuality Studies Sarah Gamble, who came to the Center having previously worked at the Rhode Island Department of Health and UC Berkeley as a violence prevention specialist with an emphasis on LGBTQ communities. Gamble formed a collaborative research working group with Madina Agénor of the School of Public Health on reproductive justice, cosponsored events with the LGBTQIA+ Thinking Initiative, the School of Public Health, and the Swearer Center, and facilitated a student luncheon entitled “‘What Will You Do with That?’ Gender and Sexuality Studies and a Career in Public Health” with Agénor and MPH graduate student Eli Wasserman. 

 

2022-23 Seminar Faculty Fellows

Yannis Hamilakis, Joukowsky Family Professor of Archaeology and Professor of Modern Greek Studies, used his time as a Faculty Fellow to further his current research. An anthropological archaeologist, Hamilakis works with the material remnants and the ruins (meant in multiple senses of the word) of contemporary border crossing and migration. This involves long-term fieldwork on the border island of Lesvos (particularly at the Moria refugee camp, the largest in Europe) carrying out archaeological ethnography and photo-ethnography, recording the remnants of border crossing but also the new ruins that are created by the assemblage of the border and the bordering apparatus. This work formed the basis of an exhibition at the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology and will result in a book project focusing on Moria.
Leticia Alvarado, Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies, utilized her year as a Faculty Fellow to work on her second book, Cut/Hoard/Suture: Aesthetics in Relation. This work expands upon her earlier book, continuing to think specifically with aesthetic gestures as politicized but departs significantly in its framing to think about minoritized populations in relation. Cut/Hoard/Suture analyzes pairs of contemporary artists of color from distinctly racialized communities whose work shares both formal qualities and strategies for negotiating a hostile present. Alvarado stated that Seminar participation “has truly been helpful for my current research, which reaches beyond the areas of my training to those directly framing the Seminar. There is nothing like reading in community.”
Matthew Guterl, L. Herbert Ballou University Professor of Africana Studies and American Studies, also worked on his next book project while a Faculty Fellow: The Hanged Man: The Ruination of Roger Casement. Casement, an Irishman, tried to smuggle weapons into Ireland during the first World War. Upon his imprisonment, and to destroy his reputation, British authorities gathered and disseminated evidence of Casement’s queer desire and behaviors, consigning Casement post-execution to historical erasure. Guterl described the Seminar as “unique. Faculty and postdocs and students, meeting weekly to sift through cutting-edge research, to share out their own findings, to collaboratively understand some of the world’s most pressing social and intellectual problems. It is a dynamic, engaging space. We are all lucky to be a part of it.” 

2022-23 Seminar Graduate Student Fellow

The Graduate Fellow was Katherine Preston, Ph.D. candidate in English. Preston noted that participating in the Seminar “has been particularly helpful to me in clarifying the implications and legibility of my work in various fields. I have especially appreciated Professor Abdur-Rahman’s valuing of creative texts as theory in their own right. The course’s attention to visual art, especially in a series of museum visits, has expanded my methods and thinking of aesthetics in poetry.”

2022-23 Seminar Undergraduate Fellows

Undergraduate Fellows included Jenna Cooley, concentrator in Comparative Literature and Latin American and Caribbean Studies; Zachary Ngin, concentrator in Modern Culture and Media and Visual Art; Colin Orihuela, concentrator in American Studies and Visual Art; and Hsiao Shan Peck, concentrator in Anthropology.

The opportunity to engage across academic career ranks was appreciated by all scholars, including undergraduates. Orihuela remarked, “I have loved the opportunity to form community with grad students, postdocs, faculty, and other undergraduates. It is rare to be able to convene horizontally with people at various stages in their academic lives, and it has been exceptionally generative to participate in an intellectually rich community where we do not lean on individuals for their singular wisdom.”

2022-23 Seminar Postdoctoral Fellows

Postdoctoral Fellows were Megan Finch, the Nancy L. Buc ’65 Postdoctoral Fellow; Melanie Abeygunawardana ’16, the Shauna M. Stark ’76, P’10 Postdoctoral Fellow; and Marianna Hovhannisyan, the Carol G. Lederer Postdoctoral Fellow. 

In Fall 2022, Finch taught a Gender and Sexuality Studies course entitled “Black Women Ruin Everything: Utopia, Dystopia, and the Future (Ends) of the World.” During her time at the Pembroke Center, Finch worked on transforming her dissertation into a book provisionally titled Perverse Relations: Idiocy, Madness, and Black Social Life. Participating in the Pembroke Seminar was an important aspect of Finch’s current book project. She stated, “the fellowship has assisted in the development of my research by giving me time and a cohort to think with. The other postdocs, Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman, and the entire Seminar have increased the number of critical perspectives I now deploy in my research and writing.”

Abeygunawardana taught an advanced undergraduate seminar “Feeling Race” that examined how emotion factors into a longer history of race, racism, and resistance in the United States. Being part of the Seminar and of a scholarly cohort was an invaluable experience for Abeygunawardana. She remarked, “It’s been wonderful to have a cohort of junior scholars to collaborate with. I have really appreciated being able to share work and exchange feedback, since we all come from different disciplines. It’s helped push my research into unfamiliar territory, which ultimately benefits the work.” During her time at the Pembroke Center, Abeygunawardana worked on her first scholarly book and turned parts of her dissertation into research talks.

Hovhannisyan’s work engages with the archival aftermath of the Armenian Genocide and present day events in the region. She brought this experience to bear on her participation in the Seminar as well as in her spring Gender and Sexuality Studies course, “Gaps and Silences: In and Out of the Archives,” which asked students to engage with the Pembroke Center Archives. During her time at the Pembroke Center, Hovhannisyan worked on developing her dissertation, “Armenian Archival Imaginaries,” into a book. 

Participation in the Pembroke Seminar was also critical to Hovhannisyan’s work. She noted that, “The intellectually caring and supportive space created by Professor Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman was a unique invitation to find alliances and solidarities, create a shared dialog with my colleague-fellows and seminar participants as well as to learn how to conceptualize and theorize the conditions of surviving and resilience in ongoing systemic state violence, in the case of historical erasures and displacements.”

The Pembroke Postdoctoral Fellows also organized a research symposium for Seminar participants. “University (and) Ruin” addressed the university as the protagonist and antagonist of several competing narratives about the state of the world and its ruin or revitalization. Building upon this year’s Seminar topic, “In the Afterlives and Aftermaths of Ruin,” this symposium sought to enable conversations across levels of the university, and with the incredibly generative work and presences of CUNY Graduate Center Professors Amber Jamilla Musser (2012-13 Pembroke Center Postdoctoral Fellow) and Kandice Chuh about the university as potentially, in both positive and negative ways, ruined as well as ruinous. Moreover, the symposium asked participants to actively think about and publicly engage with their own structural and affective relationships to the university and their own, potentially ruinous, desires within and for it.

Student Research Grant and Prize Recipients

Graduate Student Grants and Prizes

Steinhaus/Zisson Research Grants (graduate)

Ailish Burns, doctoral candidate in Sociology
Project title: The Social Landscape of Severe Maternal Morbidity: A Regional Decomposition

Pembroke Center Research Development Grant for Graduate Students

Devon Clifton, doctoral candidate in English
Project title: Psychoanalytics: Towards a Black Object Study

Marie J. Langlois Dissertation Prize 

Nell Lake Ph.D. ’23, English
Project title: Mother. Nurse. Housewife. Maid: Women, Race, and the Politics of Care in America since 1900

Undergraduate Grants and Prizes

Steinhaus/Zisson Research Grants (undergraduate)

Malcolm Shanks ’23.5, Gender and Sexuality Studies concentrator
Project title: Gender Transformation & Political Ideology in West Central Africa, 1500-1700

Aisha Tipnis ’23, Science, Technology, and Society concentrator
Project title: Pelvic Spectators: Entanglements of the Speculum in the Gynecological Pelvic Exam

Barbara Anton Community Research Grant 

Rachel Tam ’23, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Biology concentrator
Project title: Not Actually Pro-Life, but Anti-Birthing People’s Rights: an Analysis on the Operations of Crisis Pregnancy Centers in Rhode Island

Enid Wilson Undergraduate Travel Fellowship

Simran Singh ’23, Health and Human Biology concentrator
Project title: “Cripping” and Queering Health – Understanding the Sexual and Reproductive Health Care Needs and Experiences of Neurodivergent Sexual Minoritized People: A Scoping Review

Helen Terry MacLeod Research Grant 

Leona Hariharan ’23, Theatre Arts and Performance Studies and Neuroscience concentrator
Project title: Embodied Imaginations: Performance, Care, and Healing Justice

Linda Pei Undergraduate Research Grant

Elon Collins ’23.5, Gender and Sexuality Studies concentrator
Project title: Refusing Captivity: The Transformative Potential of Pornography in Black Women’s Radical Subjectivity

Ruth Simmons Prize in Gender and Women’s Studies

Sofia Sacerdote ’22.5, American Studies concentrator
Project title: “Dead but Not Disabled”: What the Lawsuit and Campaign to Change the CDC Definition of AIDS Reveal about Disability in Post-Reagan America

Ruth Simmons Prize in Gender and Women’s Studies (honorable mention)

Katherine Xiong ’23, Comparative Literature concentrator
Project title: Post-apocalyptic Body World(ing): Transpacific Racial Capitalism, Coloniality, and Queer/Asian/Female Speculative Futures

Georgia Salke ’23, History concentrator
Project title: When Women Drink Like Men: A Gendered History of Alcoholics Anonymous' Early Years, 1935-1960

Joan Wallach Scott Prize 
Rachel Tam ’23, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Biology concentrator
Project title: Not Actually Pro-Life, but Anti-Birthing People’s Rights: an Analysis on the Operations of Crisis Pregnancy Centers in Rhode Island

Oral History Project

In 2022-23 the Pembroke Center Archives team began the work of building a new website to house the Oral History Project. This upgrade was sorely needed – the previous website, built in 2012, was the first for the project (the project itself began in 1986) and has since attracted thousands of visitors each month. The project features a growing collection of nearly 300 interviews with Brown University staff, faculty, and alumnae/i. The new site, which launched in August, expands the collection’s capacity and functionality.

Between July 2022 and June 2023, archives staff recorded five oral histories and made six oral histories available to stream online. A highlight was the Women of Brown United group interview. In this interview, eight Brown University alumnae and members of the women’s liberation student group, Women of Brown United (WBU), discuss their day-to-day lives and group activism in the wake of the sexual revolution and other cultural shifts of the late 1960s/early 1970s. These women were students at the time that the women’s college in Brown University, Pembroke College, merged with the men’s college in Brown.

Newly recorded:

Anonymous, 2023

Class of 1998, 25th reunion

Class of 1973, 50th reunion

Joan Katz Betesh, class of 1973

Joan Wallach Scott, faculty

Newly available:

Sebastián Castro Niculescu, class of 2020

Class of 1998, 25th reunion

Class of 1973, 50th reunion

Lillian Lim, class of 1973

Jennifer Currier, staff

Women of Brown United

Volume 33. 2-3 (December, 2022)

In this special issue edited by Michelle Rada, contributors consider “the ties, torsions, and contradictions between psychoanalysis and solidarity,” Rada writes.  

Table of contents

Michelle Rada, “Overdetermined: Psychoanalysis and Solidarity”

Anna Kornbluh, “Solidarity Words”

Samo Tomšič, “No Such Thing as Society? On Competition, Solidarity, and Social Bond”

Ankhi Mukherjee, “Psychoanalysis of the Excommunicated”

Rachel Greenspan, “Framing Psychoanalysis in the Context of the World”

Hannah Zeavin, “No Touching: Boundary Violation and Analytic Solidarity”

Alex Colston, “For Better or Worst: The Social Bond of Hysterics on Strike”

Todd McGowan, “Mainstreaming Fantasy: Politics without Reserve”

Tracy McNulty, “The Traversal of the Fantasy as an Opening to Humanity”

Fernanda Negrete, “The Aesthetic Pass: Beauty and the End of Analysis”

Gila Ashtor, “Tender Pessimism”

Ronjaunee Chatterjee, “Bearing the Intolerable: Analytic Love”
 

Volume 34.1 (May, 2023)

In their introduction to this special issue of differences dedicated to the work of Leo Bersani, Jacques Khalip and John Paul Ricco describe the “homo-collocation” in this collection as “an assembly of critical thinkers, strangers and friends, thinking, reading, and writing alongside and athwart Bersani’s writings but never quite paying tribute or genuflecting to him.” 

Table of contents

Jacques Khalip and John Paul Ricco, “Homoverse”

Richard Rambuss, “A tergo”

John David Rhodes, “Aestheticism”

Adrian Rifkin, “Assyrians”

Joel Faflak, “Bare”

Mikko Tuhkanen, “Before”

Kris Cohen, “Bracket”

Ramsey McGlazer, “Cage”

Jacques Khalip, “Coercion”

Lynne Huffer, “Correspondence”

S. Pearl Brilmyer, “Deconstruction”

Elissa Marder, “Excitement”

Bobby Benedicto, “Failure”

Tom Roach, “Fascination”

Amber Jamilla Musser, “Femininity” 

Peter Rehberg, “Fisting”

Amy Hollywood, “Ghosts”

Andrea Gadberry, “Hand”

Claire Colebrook, “Happiness”

Lisa Downing, “Im/mobility”

John Paul Ricco, “Incongruity”

David L. Clark, “Less”

Julia Jarcho, “Maggie”

Whitney Davis, “Mobility”

Tom Holert, “Participation”

Karen Redrobe, “Perhaps”

Ryan Dohoney, “Renunciation”

Eleanor Kaufman, “Sadism”

Joseph Litvak, “Seductive”

Lee Edelman, “Sentences”

Michael Lucey, “Sociological”

William Haver, “Soku”

David Lloyd, “Things”

Forest Pyle, “Unlike”

Zahid R. Chaudhary and Robyn Wiegman, “Un/reading”

Damon Ross Young, “Withdrawal”

Advisory Council 2022-23

Sophie Waskow Rifkin ’07, Chair

Emily Coe-Sullivan ’99, Vice-Chair

Members

Pamela Arya ’84, P’18

Bernicestine McLeod Bailey ’68, LHD’23 hon., P’99 ’03

Marcia R. Ely ’80

Johanna Fernández ’93

Yvonne P. Goldsberry ’82

Ryan G. W. Grubbs ’10

Ulle Holt ’66, AM’92, PhD’00, P’93 ’02

Ellen Hunter ’04

Barbara Dugan Johnson ’83, P’16

Carol M. Lemlein ’67, P’90

Andrea Levere ’77, P’10

Ellen McCallum ’89

Joan Hoost McMaster ’60

Kaitlyn Murphy ’04

Leslie Newman ’75 AM’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

Judith Surkis ’92

Leora Tanenbaum ’91

Donna Zaccaro ’83, P’19

Ex Officio

 Nancy L. Buc ’65 LLD’94 hon.

Anne Buehl ’88

Joan MacLeod Heminway ’83

Jean Howard ’70 LHD’16 hon.

Anne Jones Mills ’60

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

In November 2022, under the auspices of the Black Feminist Theory Project, the Pembroke Center hosted The Nicknames of Distortion: A Hortense Spillers symposium to celebrate the work of Black feminist theorist Hortense Spillers. This event was also the 2022–23 Shauna M. Stark ’76, P’10 Out of the Archive event, and coincided with a curated exhibition from the Spillers papers in the Black Feminist Theory collection at the Pembroke Archives. The event featured participation from Spillers, as well as a keynote lecture from C. Riley Snorton (University of Chicago) and a conversation between Spillers and Margo Natalie Crawford (University of Pennsylvania). This symposium was proposed and led by graduate students Tara Holman, Christopher Lasasso, Kiran Saili, and Semilore Sobande in collaboration with the Pembroke Center. The symposium was well attended, with a completely full house for the closing conversation between Spillers and Crawford. As Crawford commented afterwards on Twitter, the experience of the symposium was “sustained revelation and joy.”

Dr. Shoniqua Roach was the 2022-23 Affiliated Scholar with the Black Feminist Theory Project. Roach is a queer Black feminist writer and Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University. An American Council of Learned Societies and Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, her peer-reviewed work appears in venues such as Signs: journal of women in culture and society, differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies, and American Quarterly, among others. She also gave a talk as part of the Pembroke Seminar, entitled “The Black Bedroom.”

The LGBTQIA+ Thinking Initiative hosted several successful events in 2022-23, including the sold-out “Pedagogy, Pleasure, and Danger” (a workshop for instructors at Brown and RISD); a screening and discussion of Todd Haynes’ 2002 film Far From Heaven (in conjunction with Film Thinking at the Cogut Institute); a talk by Eric A. Stanley (UC Berkeley); and the online panel discussion “Queer(ing) Pandemics/Queer-as-Pandemic” featuring Marlon M. Bailey (Washington University, St. Louis); Eva Hayward (Utrecht University); Joseph Osmundson (New York University); and Sarah Williams (Brown).

 

2022-23 was the inaugural year of the Pembroke Public Health Collaborative, an interdisciplinary project providing opportunities for students and faculty to explore the intersections of public health and gender and sexuality studies. The project is led by Visiting Assistant Professor of the Practice of Gender and Sexuality Studies Sarah Gamble. Gamble formed a collaborative research working group with Madina Agénor of the School of Public Health on reproductive justice, cosponsored events with the LGBTQIA+ Thinking Initiative, the School of Public Health, and the Swearer Center, and facilitated a student luncheon entitled “‘What Will You Do with That?’ Gender and Sexuality Studies and a Career in Public Health” with Agénor and MPH graduate student Eli Wasserman. 

The Pembroke Center Publics Initiative and Lecture Series brings 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. In 2023, the Pembroke Publics speaker was Dorothy Roberts. 

Dorothy Roberts is the 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor and George A. Weiss University Professor of Law & Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, with joint appointments in the Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology and the Law School, where she is the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights. She is also the founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society. An internationally recognized scholar, public intellectual, and social justice advocate, she has written and lectured extensively on race, gender, and class inequities in U.S. institutions and has been a leader in transforming public thinking and policy on reproductive freedom, child welfare, and bioethics. Roberts’ talk, “All of Reproductive Justice”, addressed the importance of recognizing, integrating, and acting on all the key principles of reproductive justice.

Project description:

Scholarship has established that the experience of pain is culturally defined. 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. Admission to a hospital draws a patient away from familiar remedies and substitutes new — and sometimes dangerous — pharmacology. Increasingly, there is limited overlap between the patient’s medicine cabinet and the provider’s formulary. 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.

This research group proposed a journal club and lecture series that brought together humanists, social scientists, and allied health professionals. Monthly meetings and public events generated interdisciplinary discussions and a range of outcomes with opportunity for impact in the university, the hospital system, and the diverse communities of Rhode Island.

Project website: https://prescriptionpadpolitics.com/

Project Directors

William Page, Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine, Brown University
Kim Adams, American Council of Learned Societies Emerging Voices Fellow, Stanford University, Brown University
Fred Schiffman, Sigal Family Professor of Humanistic Medicine, Professor of Medicine, Brown University
Sarah Williams, Louise Lamphere Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies, Brown University

Project description: 

The C.O.M.P.A.S.S. Project served as 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. In turn, these findings were used to support The Keeper Project, an ongoing research initiative led by hip hop artists, Akua Naru and Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo (aka SAMMUS), as well as eminent hip hop scholar Tricia Rose, Chancellor’s Professor of Africana Studies, Associate Dean of the Faculty for Special Initiatives, and Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown. This project called attention to the systematic erasure of women and girls from popular and scholarly accounts of hip hop artistry and innovation; and challenged these outcomes through the presentation of a rich counter-narrative, devised from careful documentation of their life stories, recorded works, headlines, hashtags, and notably, their absences. 

Project Director
Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo, Mellon Gateway Postdoctoral Fellow, Music, Brown University