We welcomed two staff members to our team this year, in new or newly configured roles. In May 2025, Erin Perfect joined the Pembroke Center Archives staff as the processing archivist. This new position will enable the Archives to meet the needs of the growing community of researchers from around the world who utilize our collections. And in July 2025, Scott Jackshaw AM’22 PhD’25 was appointed the managing editor at differences, a role previously held by Denise Davis alongside her other roles as associate teaching professor in Gender and Sexuality Studies (GNSS) and director of the GNSS Graduate Certificate Program. Now, for the first time in the history of differences, the managing editor role is a full-time position, one long demanded by the volume and complexity of the work. 

This year’s Pembroke Seminar, “Unwriting the Anthropocene: A Call to Experiment,” took as its subject art and experimentation in relation to the anthropocene, or the time/geological age of humanity’s greatest impact on the environment and natural world.  Faculty leader Macarena Gómez-Barris (Modern Culture and Media) expanded the Seminar’s traditional research scope to include increased engagement with scholar-practitioners, artists, and writers. This year’s four postdoctoral fellows organized an April research roundtable that addressed forms of writing at “the edge of life.” “Prelude to the End: Addressing a Dying Earth” featured current work from Susana Draper (Princeton), Avery Gordon (UC Santa Barbara), Tyrone S. Palmer (Wesleyan), and Kali Rubaii (Purdue).

Perhaps the most momentous development this year is the plan to update our building, Pembroke Hall. It is hard to overstate the importance of this renovation to our work. For the first time in many years, Pembroke Center faculty, fellows, staff, and students will be located under one roof, in a building specifically renovated for the needs of our growing programs and initiatives. The renovated home of the Pembroke Center, due to re-open in fall 2025, will include a full-service Archives including a workshop, gallery, and reading room; increased and improved space for exhibits and events; and a number of new collaboration and study areas. These exciting updates would not have been possible without the generous support of an honored member of our Pembroke Center Advisory Council. I am deeply grateful to her for her support and vision.

We wrap up 2024–25 amidst great uncertainty for academic institutions. It is with no small sense of relief that our work at the Pembroke Center continues to grow and flourish despite these challenges. I am grateful to the Pembroke Center faculty, staff, and students who helped build another incredible year together.

2024–25 Seminar Fellows

In addition to Seminar leader Macarena Gómez-Barris, three Brown faculty members held Seminar Faculty Fellowships: Xan Chacko, assistant teaching professor in science, technology, and society; Jeremy Lehnen, associate teaching professor of language studies, associate director of the Center for Language Studies, and director of the Brazil Initiative; and Eleni Sikelianos, professor of literary arts.

There were four Seminar Postdoctoral Fellows this year: Patricia Ekpo, Nancy L. Buc ’65 LLD’94 hon postdoctoral fellow; Sarah Richter, Pembroke Center postdoctoral fellow; María Gloria Robalino, Carol G. Lederer postdoctoral fellow; and Eda Tarak, Shauna M. Stark ’76, P’10 postdoctoral fellow. 
In 2025-26, the postdoctoral fellows will start new positions:

• Patricia Ekpo, assistant professor, Department of History of Art and Visual Studies, Cornell University
• Sarah Richter, adjunct lecturer, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Brown University
• María Gloria Robalino, assistant professor of Spanish, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures,Washington University in St. Louis
• Eda Tarak, postdoctoral fellow, Center for Environmental Humanities, Cogut Institute for the Humanities, Brown University

Four graduate students held Seminar Graduate Fellowships this year. They were Istifaa Ahmed (American Studies), Isaac Essex (American Studies), Ana Gonzalez San Martin (Archaeology and the Ancient World), and JD Stokely (Theatre Arts and Performance Studies). 

The Pembroke Seminar hosted two Seminar Undergraduate Fellows this year: Rachel Kamphaus (English and Classics) and Jo Ouyang (Brown/RISD, Ethnic Studies and Painting).

Graduate Student Grants and Prizes

Steinhaus/Zisson Pembroke Center Research Grants for Undergraduate and Graduate Students
Luiz Paulo Ferraz, History
Project: “‘The Original Earth Defenders’: Gender, Environment, and the Rise of Brazil's Indigenous Women Leaders”

Kiana Knight, Africana Studies
Project: “Translating Racial Uplift: Black Women, Language, and International Politics, 1918-1965”

Mohadeseh Salari Sardari, History of Art and Architecture
Project: “Craving Her Space: Negotiating Architectural Boundaries in the Lives of Taj Alsaltane and Bibi Maryam Bakhtiari”

Pembroke Center Research Development Grant for Graduate Students
Mickell Carter, Africana Studies
Project: “Stylin’ Black Power: Fashioning Identity and Masculinity”

Victoria Cheff, French and Francophone Studies
Project: “Stérile Volupté: Productive Sterility in Baudelaire, Vivien, Rachilde, and Colette”

Tara Holman, English
Project: “Aestheticizing the Maternal: Creative Enactments toward Relationality”

Madeline Nicholson, Anthropology
Project: “Adopting Change: An Ethnographic Investigation of Transnational Adoptee Activism in Norway”

Semilore Sobande, English
Project: “Ghostwriters: Black Women and Representation in 20th-Century Anglophone and Francophone Literature of the African Diaspora”

Amber Hawk Swanson, Theatre Arts and Performance Studies 
Project: “Hemings and Lewinsky Studies, as Made Imaginable by Marisa Williamson’s Sally & Monica’s Hot Tub Hangout (2014)”

Marie J. Langlois Dissertation Prize 
Harper Shalloe, Modern Culture and Media
Project: “Sick, Sad World: Holism and Less-Than-Human Thought”

Honorable mention: 
Allyson LaForge, American Studies
Project: “Materializing Futurity: Networks of Native Organizing in the Northeast”

Read more about the prizewinning dissertations.

Undergraduate Grants and Prizes

Steinhaus/Zisson Pembroke Center Research Grants for Undergraduate and Graduate Students
Shravya Sompalli ’25, Ethnic Studies, Computer Science
Project: “Opening the Curtains: Reclaiming Technology-Enabled Narratives on Massage and Sex Work in Queens, New York”

Barbara Anton Community Research Grant 
Anusha Gupta ’25, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Public Health
Project: “Evaluating the Impact of the Rhode Island Teen Institute (RITI) 2024 on Youth Leadership and Community Development”

Jo Ouyang ’26, Ethnic Studies, Painting (Brown/RISD)
Project: “Organizing the Asian/American/South: Examining Strategies of Racial Justice Organizing within Asian/American Communities in Atlanta”

Enid Wilson Undergraduate Fellowship
San Kwon ’25, Comparative Literature
Project: “Theorizing Ellipses as a Critical Concept”

Alissa Simon ’25, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Political Science
Project: “Private Bodies, Public Protections: Imagining an Affirmative Privacy Right in Domestic Violence Legal Reform”

Helen Terry MacLeod Research Grant 
Rachel Kamphaus ’25, English, Classics
Project: “All About Me: Re-Writing the Subject in the Feminist Poet’s Kunstlerroman”

RL Wheeler ’25, Ethnic Studies, Literary Arts

Linda Pei Undergraduate Research Grant
Sophi Aronson ’25, Health and Human Biology
Project: “Programmatic Integration of Birth Doula Care into Health Systems in the United States: An Integrative Review”

Olivia Hanley ’25, International and Public Affairs
Project: “Black Women Activists within the United States’ Civil Rights Movement and in South Africa's Anti-apartheid Movement”

Ruth Simmons Prize 
Shravya Sompalli ’25, Ethnic Studies, Computer Science
Project: “Mapping ‘Tech Against Trafficking’: State Surveillance, Corporate Datafication, and Grassroots Cartographies”

Honorable mention: 
Anna Brent-Levenstein ’25, Sociology
Project: “Women Are Our Rehabilitation: Familial Labor and Advocacy in an Era of Mass Incarceration”

Alexandra Mork ’25, History
Project: “State-Crossed Lovers: Evasive, Interracial Marriages in Nineteenth-Century Virginia”

Joan Wallach Scott Prize 
Alissa Simon ’25, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Political Science
Project: “Private Bodies, Public Protections: Imagining an Affirmative Privacy Right in Domestic Violence Legal Reform”

Read more about the prizewinning undergraduate projects.

Undergraduate Concentration

Six students graduated from the GNSS concentration:

• Anusha Gupta

• Marlie Kahan

• Elie Lubin

• Lena Noya

• Alissa Simon

• Imani Stewart

Graduate Certificate Program

This academic year, 23 students were enrolled in the GNSS Graduate Certificate Program from 12 disciplines, including Archaeology, Classics, Musicology, Public Health, and Theatre Arts and Performance Studies. Four students graduated from the program in May, with two more graduating in fall 2025.

2025 GNSS Graduate Certificate Recipients

• Sarah Christensen, History

• Tali Hershkovitz, Religious Studies

• Scott Jackshaw, English

• Katherine E. A. Preston, English

• Harper Shalloe, Modern Culture and Media

• Anabelle Suitor, Anthropology

Elizabeth Munves Sherman ’77, P’06 ’09 Lecture in Gender and Sexuality Studies

The 2024–25 Elizabeth Munves Sherman ’77, P’06 ’09 Lecture in Gender and Sexuality Studies was delivered by Thangam Ravindranathan, Professor of French and Francophone Studies. Ravindranathan's teaching and research interests include 20th- and 21st-century literature and critical theory; narratives of travel and space; the contemporary novel; the question of the animal; literature and ecology. Ravindranathan’s lecture, “Unearthly Literature: Re-reading Nathalie Sarraute,” inquires into literature’s ways of registering environmental degradation, with a particular focus on French novels and critical thought from the 1950s through the 1960s. Taken from her forthcoming book Unearthly Literature, the lecture proposed an “exorbitant” approach to reading for what isn’t self-evident. Re-reading becomes a procedure for retracing and re-enlivening details and material traces that reconnect novels to extratextual histories of environmental exploitation and culturally disavowed or forgotten links between France and its former colonies.

The Sherman lecture can be viewed on the Pembroke Center YouTube playlist. 

This agreement evolved from a multi-decade relationship of growing scope and complexity. The partnership began in 1987 when, five years after the Pembroke Center established the Pembroke Center Oral History Project (then, Brown Women Speak), the Center and the University Library established a permanent women’s history archive at Brown. Utilizing funds secured in a joint fundraising effort, the original initiative focused on identifying hidden women’s history collections within the Brown University Archives, assisting the University Archivist in describing those collections and contacting Rhode Island women’s organizations to further develop the collections. 

Nearly 40 years later, the MOU delineates the relationship between the Pembroke Center and the John Hay Library, defines each unit’s collecting scopes, and outlines the shared roles and responsibilities that uphold the Pembroke/Hay partnership.

Gandhi and Murphy received crucial support from Pembroke Center Director of Academic Programs and Outreach Wendy Allison Lee and Assistant Archivist Amanda M. Knox. Additionally, Advisory Council member Nancy L. Buc ’65 LLD’94 hon. provided invaluable advice and institutional expertise that helped Pembroke Center staff draft this important document. 

Feminist Theory Archive Welcomes Notable Collections from Deborah E. McDowell, C. Riley Snorton, and Mimi Thi Nguyen

In September, cultural theorist C. Riley Snorton contributed a first batch of papers to the Archives’ Black Feminist Theory collections. Snorton is Professor of English and gender studies at the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender and the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. The 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), Snorton connected with the Pembroke Center Archives after delivering the keynote lecture at the 2022 Pembroke Center graduate-student-organized symposium on the scholarship of Hortense J. Spillers. Snorton went on to co-edit The Flesh of the Matter: A Hortense Spillers Reader (Vanderbilt University Press, 2024), which considers Spillerian theory through an examination of Spillers’ archival collection, housed within the Feminist Theory Archive. Snorton’s contribution marks the fulfillment of an important piece of the Archives’ mission: to gather and make available for research “scholarly genealogies,” or multiple generations of interconnected feminist thought.

In May, Murphy traveled to the University of Virginia to gather the papers of Deborah E. McDowell, Alice Griffin professor of English, former director of the Carter G. Woodson Institute, and current director of the Julian Bond Papers Project. McDowell joined UVA in 1987 where she published numerous texts, including ‘The Changing Same': Studies in Fiction by African-American Women (Indiana University Press, 1995), Leaving Pipe Shop: Memories of Kin (Scribner, 1998), The Punitive Turn: Race, Inequality, and Mass Incarceration (UVA Press, 2013), and the landmark Norton Anthology of African-American Literature (Norton, 1997).

A renowned scholar of African American/American literature, McDowell is a key connector in the academic careers of other Africana studies scholars and feminist theorists. McDowell’s papers include correspondence, draft writings, and rare conference materials. The addition of McDowell’s collection is a milestone for the Pembroke Center’s Black Feminist Theory collections. McDowell’s papers have been in the pipeline for preservation since the founding of the project by scholar Ann duCille. Her papers will become available for use in the coming year. 

This summer, another major collection arrived at the Archives. The first batch of papers of Dartmouth College Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Mimi Thi Nguyen includes materials from her work as a zine maker, as well as a scholar of women, gender, and sexuality studies and Asian American studies. Nguyen is the author of the books The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages (Duke University Press, 2012) and The Promise of Beauty (Duke University Press, 2024), which consider the promise of “giving” freedom concurrent and contingent with waging war and the relationship between the concept of beauty and narratives of crisis and catastrophe, respectively. Nguyen has made zines since 1991, including Slander (formerly known by other titles) and the compilation zine Race Riot.

Nguyen’s contribution to the Feminist Theory Archive—along with those from C. Riley Snorton and Kimberly Juanita Brown—marks a generational shift towards the feminist scholarship of Generation X and continues the documentation of scholarly genealogies. Another contributor to the Feminist Theory Archive is Nguyen's mentor, Caren Kaplan, whose work on transnational feminist studies influenced Nguyen’s own scholarship. Nguyen plans to contribute the drafts of a fan zine she created about Kaplan to the Feminist Theory Archive in the near future.  

Out of the Archives: Heather Love on Barbara Johnson

The Pembroke Center Archives’ Shauna M. Stark ’76, P’10 Out of the Archive event for 2024–25 was “Repeat What We Don’t Understand: In the Barbara Johnson Papers,” given by Heather Love, professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. This was the first lecture by a donor to the Feminist Theory Archives collection about another donor to the collection—feminist theorist and scholar Barbara Johnson, a teacher and mentor of Love’s. Love’s lecture addressed the emergence of the personal voice in Johnson’s work alongside Love’s reflections on her own relationship to Johnson and her scholarship, and what these observations might reveal about the “I” that speaks in criticism. This lecture can be viewed on the Pembroke Center YouTube playlist.

Processing Archivist Hired

In May 2025, Erin Perfect joined the Archives team in a new role as processing archivist. This position will enable the Archives to scale up its description, reference, and instruction services to help meet the needs of the Archives’ growing community of researchers.

 An experienced archivist/librarian in the Providence area, Perfect served in roles at the Providence Athenaeum, the Rhode Island School of Art and Design, and most recently at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts. Perfect joined the Pembroke Center in May 2023 as a contract archivist. In this role, she migrated the Pembroke Center Oral History Project to a new platform and processed the Xochitl Gonzalez, Jennifer Terry, Wendy Brown, and Donna M. Hughes collections. 

Perfect holds a Master of Library and Information Science from San Jose State University and a Bachelor of Fine Art in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Nellie B. Nicholson Scrapbook Documents Pembroke College History

In March 2025, the Pembroke Center Archives acquired the scrapbook of Nellie B. Nicholson, Brown University class of 1911. Nicholson is believed to be the fifth Black woman graduate from Pembroke College, the women’s college in Brown, and was a leading advocate for Black women’s right to vote. This acquisition is historically significant: until now, Brown University has had no visual evidence beyond formal yearbook pictures or portraits documenting the lives and experiences of Black women at Pembroke College in the Edwardian era. 

The Nicholson scrapbook includes 172 photographs of friends and family members, Pembroke College campus buildings and women’s athletics, Nicholson’s housemates at 45 East Transit Street in Providence, and post-graduation travels and work. Many of these include handwritten captions. Candid photographs capture slice of life moments, friendship circles, and family. The scrapbook also includes programs and ribbons from various events primarily at Brown, and dried flowers. Materials in this scrapbook date from 1906 to 1917, but the bulk of the items date from 1910 to 1911.

The Nicholson scrapbook is currently in conservation and will be fully digitized. Archives staff anticipate that the scrapbook will be available for in-person research at the John Hay Library and online through the Brown Digital Repository sometime in the 2025–26 academic year.  

New Collections 

Feminist Theory Archive

In the last year, the Feminist Theory Archive made the following collections available for research:

• Wendy Brown papers
• Leopoldina Fortunati papers
• Susan Stanford Friedman papers
• Nancy K. Miller papers (addenda)
• Christina Simmons papers
• Jennifer Terry papers

Feminist Activism in Rhode Island

In the last year, the Feminist Activism Archive made the following collections available for research:

• Rhode Island Women’s Health Collective records

Women and Gender at Brown

In the last year, the Women and Gender at Brown Archive made the following collections available for research:

• Rhea Maxine deCourdes papers
• Xochitl Gonzalez papers
• Pembroke Center records (addenda)
• Pembroke College Department of Physical Education records
• Gail Frances Webber papers

Oral History Project

Between July 2024 and June 2025, Archives staff recorded six interviews and made two available to stream online. One highlight was an interview with members of the Rhode Island Women’s Health Collective, a private, non-profit organization whose membership included both consumers and providers of healthcare services from 1975 to 1999. Hilary Salk ‘63 was a founding member of the Collective.

Newly recorded:

• Kloey Albertson, class of 2007 and president of Brown’s Student Veterans Society, Army
• Premal Dharia, class of 2000
• Becky Scheusner, class of 2018 and Office of Military Affiliated Students Program Coordinator, Navy
• Women’s Leadership Council (three-part series)

A New Staff Member at differences

The Pembroke Center—housed differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies has welcomed a full-time staff member to the editorial team. Scott Jackshaw AM’22 PhD’25 has been appointed the journal’s managing editor, having previously held a variety of positions at differences.

As a graduate student at Brown, Jackshaw served as an assistant editor at the journal, where they led several key projects. In 2023, Jackshaw designed and launched the journal's online forum for critical prose. Jackshaw is also co-organizer of the journal's annual Limits of Legibility colloquium. These new projects have expanded differences’ reach and made the addition of a full-time staff member all the more necessary. 

Historically, the differences editorial office has been a lean operation. Since 2000, Associate Teaching Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies (GNSS), Director of the GNSS Graduate Certificate Program, and differences Editor Denise Davis has dedicated a significant portion of her workweek to running the journal, relying upon the essential contributions of part-time graduate student assistant editors. As Davis focuses on her work with the GNSS program, she will remain on the journal's masthead as a coeditor alongside Elizabeth Weed, Ellen Rooney, and Elizabeth A. Wilson. Jackshaw will take on key managerial responsibilities that will allow differences and its online forum to foster and publish work from a broadening range of scholars. Graduate student fellows, including Interdisciplinary Opportunities Fellows, will continue to provide editorial support. Read more about Scott Jackshaw.

Refreshing the Mission Statement and Advisory Board

This academic year also brought an updated mission and advisory board for differences—the first significant revision to either since the journal began publishing 35 years ago. 

To reflect and support its updated mission, the journal welcomed dozens of scholars to its advisory board and renewed its relationships with several others.

differences Advisory Board

Limits of Legibility

The journal also hosted the second iteration of its annual colloquium series. “Limits of Legibility: The Climate of Critique” was held in March 2025 and featured Lynne Huffer (Emory), Axelle Karera (Emory), Dixa Ramírez D’Oleo (Brown) and Jean-Thomas Tremblay (York), and was moderated by Elizabeth A. Wilson (Emory). These speakers were invited to comment on the turn to discourses of entanglement and relationality in the environmental humanities, which risks displacing the social and racial antagonisms that have given rise to ecological disaster. A recording of the colloquium can be viewed on the Pembroke Center YouTube playlist. 

Volume 35.2 (September 2024)

“Inside the Black (W)hole” stages a spirited cross-disciplinary and intergenerational dialogue about what Evelynn Hammonds’s 1994 differences essay “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality” has meant and continues to mean for queer black feminist knowledge production within and beyond the United States. Contributors to this special issue, organized by guest editor Shoniqua Roach, interrogate what it means for queer black feminists to labor in a field under constant erasure, find possibilities for queer and trans and sick black women’s erotic agency in the context of hostile institutional formations, and analyze the relevance of empirical black holes for theorizing polymorphous black female sexualities. From inside the black (w)hole, these essays chart the history, present, and futurity of “Black (W)holes” and, by extension, the black diasporic feminist, lesbian, queer, and trans intellectual and sociopolitical lifeworlds to which it has contributed.

Table of Contents

• Shoniqua Roach, “Inside the Black (W)hole: A Queer Black Feminist Retrospective”

• Sharon P. Holland, “Black (W)holes: A Problem for Feminist Thought”

• Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, “‘I guess I have to just put my dick on the table’: Rough Trade, Tenure, and Black Sexualities as Self-defense”

• V Varun Chaudhry, “The Black (W)hole of Dysphoria”

• Amber Jamilla Musser, “Black, Queer, and Sick: Amplifying Representation’s Noisiness”

• Julian Kevon Kamilah Glover, “Suturing the (W)holes: Erotic Freedom and Reflections on Black Female Sexuality”

• Kimberly Bain, “HOLD : SPACE”

• Petal Samuel, “Black Gravity, or a Hidden History of Empire”

• Megan Finch, “Is It Lonely (T)here? Intramurals, Black (W)holes, and Black Feminism”

• Moya Bailey, “‘Black (W)holes’ and the Propagation of New Possibilities”

• Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, “The Cosmos Is a Black Aesthetic”

• Naima Lowe, “Black (W)hole”

Volume 35.3 (December 2024)

Guest editor Teagan Bradway brought together this special issue commemorating the twentieth anniversary of Judith Butler’s groundbreaking work of moral philosophy, Giving an Account of Oneself. “Unaccountably Queer” draws the text into conversation with queer theory, trans studies, black studies, disability studies, postcolonial theory, feminism, psychoanalysis, life writing, and narratology. Rather than assess the book’s legacy or measure its influence, contributors reflect on its untapped potential for contemporary social theory, extending aspects of Butler’s argument into new scenes of address. In a wide-ranging response to the issue, Butler moves from the scene of writing Giving an Account of Oneself to the agonizing parallels they witnessed between Jewish and lesbian separatist communities.

Table of Contents

• Teagan Bradway, “Introduction: Queer Metarelationality”

• Sara Ahmed, “On Receiving Accounts from Others”

• Lynne Huffer, “Unbearable Speech”

• Amber Jamilla Musser, “Limited Accounts: Thinking Race and Recognition”

• Cassius Adair, “Parts of Myself”

• Michael D. Snediker, “‘When your cords were tense’: Giving up on, the Giving Ground”

• Gila Ashtor, “Drink Responsibly: On Morality and Perversion”

• Leigh Gilmore, “Giving an Epistolary Account of Oneself: Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy”

• Teagan Bradway, “Renarratable Bonds: Queer Relationality in the Scene of Redress”

• Megan Cole Paustian, “Giving a Global Account of Oneself: Narratives of the Humanitarian Atlantic”

• Jules Gill-Peterson, “Who Is the Subject of Gender Self-determination?”

• Judith Butler, “Giving an Account: When, Where, for Whom, and Why?”

differences’ online forum published an interview between Teagan Bradway and Judith Butler to coincide with the publication of “Unaccountably Queer.”

Volume 36.1 (May 2025)

Sexuality and racialization remain urgent topics in progressive critical discourse. But can sex and race even be said to be legible concepts? This open issue, comprising essays on the virtual reality films of Gina Kim, Audre Lorde’s radiophonics, violent encounter in feminist-of-color performance art, and feminist exhaustion, concludes with a dossier adapting the papers delivered at the inaugural Limits of Legibility colloquium.

Table of Contents

• Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, “Spectral Forensics: The Haunted Spaces of Gina Kim’s VR Film Trilogy”

• Matthew Helm, “The Goddess in the Machine: The Radiophonics of Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name”

• Iván A. Ramos, “Breaking Down, Breaking Together: Xandra Ibarra’s Nude Laughing and the Violence of the Encounter”

• Jennifer C. Nash and Samantha Pinto, “On Exhaustion: Toward a Post-Care Feminism”

• Lee Edelman, “Ce n’est pas ça: Blackness, Sex, and the Set of Illegibles”

• David Marriott, “On Solicitude”

• Selamawit D. Terrefe, “The Question at Play”

Leadership

Emily Coe-Sullivan ’99, Chair

Barbara Dugan Johnson ’83, P’16, Vice-Chair

Members

Pamela Arya ’84, P’18

Jenny Backus ’90

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

Marcia R. Ely ’80

Rebecca Epstein ’92

Johanna Fernández ’93

Yvonne P. Goldsberry ’82

Ryan G. W. Grubbs ’10

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

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

Wendy Wilcox ’88, P’23

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 LHD’24 hon., P’07 

Jasmine Waddell ’99

Victoria Westhead ’83, P’17 ’19

Beverly H. Zweiman ’66, P’01

The LGBTQIA+ Thinking Initiative

Lynne Joyrich, director of the LGBTQIA+ Thinking Initiative, hosted the following events on behalf of the Initiative in 2024–25:

• The Rainbow Faculty and Staff Mixer: a social event for LGBTQIA+ faculty, staff, and the broader campus community to celebrate the start of the academic year;
• Politics and Pedagogy: Political Discourse In and Of the Classroom: A workshop for Brown and RISD instructors on navigating the fraught terrain of political discourse both in and about the classroom;
• Life, Death, and Deviation in Queer Televisualities: a symposium on queer televisuality in a time described as both post-identity and post-television. This symposium can be viewed on the Pembroke Center YouTube playlist.

The Public Health Collaborative

The Director of the Pembroke Center Public Health Collaborative, Sarah Gamble, led the following projects in 2024–25:

• A Community-Based Learning and Research course (GNSS 1300: Gender-Based Violence Prevention), with student presentations to the Rhode Island Cross Campus Learning Collaborative on Sexual Violence at the end of the semester;

• 

• The Reproductive Justice Collaborative, a group of Brown faculty, staff, graduate, and undergraduate students engaged in reproductive justice research, policy, and advocacy that met monthly;
• The lecture “Reproductive Justice and Women’s Health at the Supreme Court in 2023–24: What Lies Ahead” given by Liz Tobin-Tyler, associate professor of health services, policy, and practice, in partnership with the School of Public Health and the Taubman Center for American Politics and Policy;
• Supervision of a Health Equity Scholar, Ambree Robinson, graduate student in the School of Public Health and graduate assistant to the RJC;
• Supervision and completion of an Undergraduate Teaching and Research Award (UTRA)-funded community engaged research project with the assistance of student researcher Jacqueline Zhang;
• Supervision of the second Community-Based Learning and Research (CBLR) Fellow at the Pembroke Center, undergraduate student Riyana Srihari, whose work contributed to the CBLR class taught by Gamble.

Members of the RJC collaboratively wrote an opinion piece for The Providence Journal on gender-affirming care. The final UTRA funded report, “Reproductive Justice: Community and Academic Engagement in Rhode Island and at Brown University,” is also available. Liz Tobin-Tyler’s lecture can be viewed on the Pembroke Center playlist.

The Publics Lecture Series

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. The 2024–25 Pembroke Center Publics speaker was Gillian Branstetter, writer and communications strategist for the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project. Branstetter’s lecture, “The Panic Defense: How Trans Misogyny Fueled the Rise of the Far Right,” addressed the escalation in the targeting of transgender people over the course of Donald Trump’s rise and return to the U.S. presidency, the stakes for everyone in discussions about trans bodily autonomy and freedom, and the opportunity presented by the lessons of trans feminism to free all people from assigned gender roles. Watch Branstetter’s lecture.