Pembroke Center

2023-24 Year in Review

2023-24 at the Pembroke Center featured strong collaborations, interdisciplinary conversations, and significant growth in all our program areas.

From the Director

Debbie Weinstein introduces Kate Zernike

2023-24 Interim Director of the Pembroke Center Debbie Weinstein introduces journalist and author Kate Zernike.

I was honored to serve as Interim Director of the Pembroke Center for the 2023-24 academic year. The Center featured an ambitious slate of in-person and online programming across all our initiatives; offered new and popular Gender and Sexuality Studies (GNSS) courses; saw the journal differences launch a new online platform; celebrated another successful year of the GNSS graduate certificate program; and brought in and made available for research several important archival collections.

A big piece of news is that during the next academic year, the entire Pembroke Center will come together under one roof, in Pembroke Hall. When the Center was founded in 1981, its home was in Alumnae Hall. That was still the case when I held a Pembroke postdoctoral fellowship in 2002-03 and participated in the seminar led by Professor Anne Fausto-Sterling (Nancy Duke Lewis Professor Emerita of Biology and Gender Studies). Since the renovation of Pembroke Hall in 2008, some of the Center’s offices and programs have moved to Pembroke Hall, while others remained in Alumnae Hall. Space can shape and foster intellectual community, and it is thrilling that the Pembroke Center will be united in one building.

2023-24 By the Numbers

16

GNSS concentrators graduated

14

disciplines represented in the graduate certificate

40

new/addenda archival collections

20

public programs hosted

5,840

views of Pembroke events on YouTube

39,000

times differences was accessed online

2023-24 Highlights

differences in the Spotlight

The panelists for Limits of Legibility
Panelists for Limits of Legibility. Elizabeth A. Wilson (Emory; moderator); Joan Copjec (Brown); Lee Edelman (Tufts); David Marriott (Emory); and Selamawit D. Terrefe (Tulane).
2023-24 was a year of significant growth and momentum at the Pembroke Center’s journal of feminist cultural studies, differences. In late December, differences launched a new online forum, which quickly gained momentum and has since had over 4,000 visits from 74 countries. Designed to complement the journal, the online platform keeps important conversations alive, circulates new and topical ideas, and offers scholars a venue for nascent and experimental work. 

The journal also hosted a well-attended colloquium titled “Limits of Legibility: Questions of Blackness and Sexuality.” Panelists were Joan Copjec (Brown); Lee Edelman (Tufts); David Marriott (Emory); and Selamawit D. Terrefe (Tulane). The colloquium was moderated by Elizabeth A. Wilson (Emory), who has since joined the journal’s editorial staff as an Editor.

In other good news, the 2023 Crompton-Noll Prize for Best LGBTQ Studies Article by the ASA and MLA GL/Q caucuses was awarded to Dionte Harris (UTN Knoxville), for his essay “The Smear: Vibrational Flesh and the Calculus of Black Queer Becoming in Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight.” The essay, which appeared in differences 33.1, considers how touch can enact a calculus of power that makes violence intimate and permanent in queer black life.

An Expansive Year at the Archives

Both semesters this year marked the opening of important new collections brought to Brown by the Pembroke Center Archives. The Archives team began the year with the extraordinary Voices of Mass Incarceration Symposium, marking the opening of the Mumia Abu-Jamal and Johanna Fernández ’93 collections for research. 

Project Archivist Erin Perfect
Project Archivist Erin Perfect processes the papers of Christina Crosby.

In spring, the Paula J. Giddings papers were made available for research. Notable American writer, editor, and chronicler of African American women’s history, Giddings is a former editor and journalist, critically acclaimed author, and Professor Emerita of Africana Studies at Smith College. She is the author of the renowned biography Ida, A Sword among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign against Lynching (2008). Giddings was initially identified as a possible contributor by then-graduate student and curatorial proctor N’Kosi Oates PhD ’22. With the support of Nancy L. Buc ’65 LLD’94 hon. Pembroke Center Archivist Mary Murphy, Oates led the acquisition process and Giddings’s papers opened in March.

The Archives staff was also able to expand this year, adding a temporary Project Archivist to the team. Their work focused on addressing the rising volume of incoming collections to the archive and the backlog of collections to be processed in preparation for the Pembroke Center Archives move to Pembroke Hall. This resulted in many new collections and addenda to existing collections becoming available for research.

 

Research

The 2023-24 Pembroke Seminar
Participants in the 2023-24 Pembroke Seminar.

Pembroke Seminar: "De-Colonial Retro-Speculation"

“De-Colonial Retro-Speculation”, the 2023-24 Pembroke Seminar, was led by Theatre Arts and Performance Studies Professor Patricia Ybarra. The Seminar looked back and forward to the liberationist movements, practices, art works, and theories of the recent past (1960 to 2000) by queer, feminist, and/or global majority scholars, artists, political figures, and practitioners so as to offer new modes of understanding, and intervening into, our tumultuous present. The Seminar grappled with the question of how such retro-speculation might help us understand our lives under the last half century of global Neoliberal domination, including U.S. interventions in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, Post-Cold War labor regulation, predatory global trade policies, and the valorization of human capital, developmentalism, and entrepreneurialism.

In addition to weekly Seminar meetings led by Professor Ybarra, participants heard from Kadji Amin (Emory) and Dylan Rodríguez (UC Riverside), who also each gave research lectures open to the wider Brown community and public. 

Gender and Sexuality Studies Program

In 2023-24, Gender and Sexuality Studies (GNSS) offered 15 undergraduate and graduate courses. 178 students from across the university took GNSS courses.

The Pembroke Center Archives

New Collection Names and Collections

One of the biggest developments at the Archives this year was a naming change to better reflect the Archives’ strategic collecting directions. In consultation with the Pembroke Friends Archives Committee, the groups of collections previously curated under the name “The Christine Dunlap Farnham Archive” were split into “Feminist Activism in Rhode Island” and “Women and Gender at Brown.” This change clarifies the focus of each collecting area, making it more accessible for researchers.

 

differences: a Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies

This academic year saw three issues of differences published: two open issues and one special issue. The journal continued to reach thousands of readers: the differences content site received over 39,000 hits from July 2023 to June 2024.

The Friends of the Pembroke Center

Panelists at the Washington DC Friends event
The Friends’ regional event in Washington DC “Adultification Bias: The Erasure of Black Girlhood.” Show above, panelists Rebecca Epstein ’92, Kiana T. Murphy, Logan Green, Diana Graves ’89, and moderator Dawn Risa Crumel Esq. ’89.

 

This was an exciting and busy year for the Friends of the Pembroke Center, the Centers extended network of supporters. Friends’ programming, both online and in person, drew over 250 people to hear about why women are leaving the medical profession; how to combat adultification bias towards Black girls; and the culture wars over book banning. The Friends raised over $126,445.00 in new gifts and pledges from 283 donors.

Council member Mary E. Vascellaro ’74, P’07, along with her spouse, Jerome C. Vascellaro ’74, P’07 received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree at this year’s Commencement for being a “community leader and champion of Brown alumnae.”

Mary and Jerome Vascellaro receive their honorary degrees at this year’s Commencement.
Council member Mary E. Vascellaro ’74, P’07 receiving her honorary degree, along with her spouse, Jerome C. Vascellaro ’74, P’07.

 

 

Pembroke Center Initiatives and Projects

The Black Feminist Theory Project

The following collections were welcomed to the Pembroke Center Archives as part of the Black Feminist Theory Project in 2023-24. 

 

C. Riley Snorton
C. Riley Snorton about to give a talk at the Pembroke Center’s 2022 symposium on the work and life of Hortense Spillers.

 

The Pembroke Center Archives also gained a commitment of papers from C. Riley Snorton, Professor of English Language and Literature, University of Chicago and author of Nobody Is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) and Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (University of Minnesota Press, 2017). We look forward to welcoming Professor Snorton’s papers in the near future.

Former Black Feminist Theory Project Scholar Jallicia Jolly (Amherst) returned to Pembroke Hall to deliver a talk, “Beyond Risk & Erasure: A Black Feminist Ethnography of HIV/AIDS & Reproductive Justice in Jamaica.” This talk framed Jolly’s articulation of a Black transnational feminist ethnography of HIV/AIDS and reproduction that confronts the erasures of Black women’s political labor and their reproductive desires in the current management of the long-term pandemic. 

 

Interdisciplinary Faculty Seed Grants 

The Pembroke Center interdisciplinary faculty seed grant program supports research initiatives that involve faculty from the humanities, social sciences, creative arts, health sciences, and science and technology studies. In keeping with the Pembroke Center’s intellectual mission, these research initiatives will examine intersecting dimensions of difference such as gender, sexuality, generation, work, class, race, ethnicity, language, citizenship, and religion.

The Pembroke Center awarded four faculty seed grants during the 2023-24 academic year for 2024-25 research projects.

Events at the Pembroke Center

In 2023-24, the Pembroke Center hosted, co-sponsored, or otherwise supported the below list of events.