Leila M. Lehnen is chair of the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown and president of the American Portuguese Studies Association. Born in Paris, she grew up in Brazil, Germany, and India and studied German literature at the Eberhard-Karls Universität, in Tübingen before earning degrees in comparative literature at the University of Washington and Vanderbilt University. Her research and teaching focuses on contemporary Brazilian and Latin American literature, with an emphasis on the intersection between social justice and cultural production.

Kristina Carmen Mendicino is an associate professor German studies at Brown, where she teaches courses on German literature with an emphasis on close readings as well as the intersections between literature and philosophy. She studied theater, German studies, classics, and comparative literature at the Eberhard Karls-Universität Tübingen, the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, and the Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main before completing her PhD in German Studies at Yale University in 2012. She joined the Brown faculty in 2013.

Sarah L. Thomas is the William A. Dyer, Jr. Assistant Professor of Humanities and an assistant professor of Hispanic studies. She works on contemporary fiction and film from Spain, with a secondary interest in Latin American cinema. Her research is especially concerned with cultural production emerging from (post)-dictatorship societies in the Spanish-speaking world and the representation of subjectivity, temporality, and space. Thomas joined Brown’s faculty in 2013, after receiving her PhD from New York University.

Amy Chin, a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at Brown, is a grad coordinator at the Sarah Doyle Center. She holds a BS in Industrial Labor Relations from Cornell University and a MSc in Migration Studies from Oxford University. Before coming to Brown, she spent time working at National Domestic Workers Alliance in New York and later in the labor movement in Guangzhou. Amy leads the Feminist Pedagogy Series and plans self-care and mental health events at the Sarah Doyle Center. Most days she is trying to live life like it’s golden. Research Interests: US Empire and Militarism; Feminist Epistemology; Postcolonial Theory; Critical Ethnic and Race Studies; Asian American Identity; Memory and Trauma Studies; Oral History

Matthew Ellis is a PhD candidate in the department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, as well as a co-organizer of Magic Lantern Cinema based in Providence, RI. He previously worked as a musician based out of Portland, Oregon, and was an assistant at the Northwest Film Center as well as a film programmer at 5th Avenue Cinema. He holds undergraduate degrees in Film and English Literature from Portland State University. He is currently at work on a dissertation titled “The Return of History: Twenty-First Century Cinema at the 'End' of Neoliberalism.” Research Interests: Film theory and history, global art cinema, radio and television, the history of knowledge, periodization, Marxist historiography, Foucault and genealogy.

Deborah Frempong is a PhD student in the Anthropology Department. Her focus is on the historical and contemporary constructions of womanhood in Ghanaian Christian communities. She holds a masters degree in theological studies with a focus on religion, politics and ethics from Harvard Divinity School and obtained her BA in Public Policy and Politics from Pomona College. Research Interests: religion, gender, identity, race, transnationalism, immigration, Ghana. 

Kristen Maye graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a BA in Afro-American Studies and History. Her research as a PhD candidate in the Department of Africana Studies at Brown engages political theory with questions at the intersection of New World slavery, neoliberal capitalism and gender. She is interested in probing the machinations of anti-Blackness in progressive civil society with a particular focus on the university. She investigates technologies of power that seek to produce blackness as nonhuman and violable, thus impacting possibilities for conceiving and enacting black freedom projects. Kristen spent the time between her undergraduate studies and her return to graduate school working in criminal justice and drug policy reform in New York City. In her spare time. she enjoys biking and beer.

Alessandro Moghrabi earned a B.A. in Comparative Literature at New York University in 2017 and an M.S. in Economics at Barcelona Graduate School of Economics in 2018. Now a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown, Alessandro’s research interests include: irony, late medieval and 20th century Italian narrative and theater, renaissance French theater, 20th century French theory, Shakespearian comedy, poetics. Languages: Italian, French, English, Spanish, German (beginning)

Ricardo Gomez, English

Catherine (Cate) Turner, Comparative Literature

The Pembroke Center awarded Steinhaus/Zisson Pembroke Center Research Grants to Brown graduate students Jenny Dolan, a PhD candidate in American studies, and Deborah Frempong, a PhD candidate in anthropology as well as a Graduate Student Fellow in the 2020-21 Pembroke Seminar “Narrating Debt.”

The grants, honoring Beatrice Bloomingdale Steinhaus’33, P’60, P’65, GP’87, GP’91 and Gertrude Rosenhirsch Zisson’30, P’61, P’63, GP’91, support undergraduate and graduate student research on any topic related to the work of the Pembroke Center. Preference is given to research on women’s education, health, community activism, philanthropy, and economic status, and women’s rights and well-being in the United States and in developing countries around the world. Graduate students are awarded up to $2,000 grants for their projects. 

“Constructing Willpower: The Origins of the Marshmallow Experiment”

Jenny Dolan’s dissertation is a cultural history of willpower. Her project tracks the changing meanings and uses of willpower throughout the twentieth century U.S. and explores willpower’s relationship to gender, race, and middle-class formation. In the chapter “Constructing Willpower: The Origins of the Marshmallow Experiment,” Dolan asks: how did willpower become a scientific fact? Psychologists agree that the most famous willpower experiment—the marshmallow experiment conducted at Stanford University by Walter Mischel and his colleagues—inaugurated the modern study of self-control. Mischel, however, conducted his first willpower experiments on Black and East Indian children in Trinidad during the 1950s, so Trinidad ought to be considered the birthplace of scientific willpower. Analyzing the experimental protocols that enabled willpower to emerge as an object of empirical knowledge, Dolan argues that Mischel did not discover in Trinidad a universal feature of human cognition called willpower. Rather, willpower was crafted by and through empire and the unequal power relations of colonialism. 

“Gendered Mobilities: Faith, Belonging and Spatial Geographies of Returnee Women in Accra”

Debbie Frempong’s project looks at returnee women’s modes of belonging through their reintegration experiences in Accra, Ghana, connecting questions about transnationalism, belonging, gendered subjectivities and Christianity. It asks: what do returnee women’s experiences reveal about gender, religion, and belonging in contemporary Ghana? And what is the significance of widely circulating discourses and representations that situate returnee women as figures of modernity? Consequently, it explores how the gendered politics of reintegration produces and mediates ideas of modernity and (post) colonial subjectivities. In doing so, it offers alternative ways to conceptualize the relationship between religion and belonging, looking at how social rupture, continuity and de-territorialism offers various opportunities for local and global forms of practice that coalesce, oppose or exist alongside each other. This project adds to these conceptualizations by highlighting the ways in which Accra’s religious landscape and returnee women’s cosmopolitan feminisms collide. By exploring these questions through the lens of belonging, it endeavors to show how returnee women create new communities and spatial geographies of care

The Pembroke Center awarded the Linda Pei Undergraduate Research Grant to Clare Boyle, a comparative literature concentrator. First awarded in 2008, the Linda Pei grant supports an undergraduate research project related to issues of women’s empowerment such as gender equality in the workplace, access to reproductive health care, and women’s political leadership. The grant offers up to $1000 for research support.

“To Steal a Dream”

“To Steal a Dream” asks who gets to define identity, and what happens when how others see you isn’t how you see yourself. This project is an ongoing collaboration between Boyle and Providence high school student named Lina, whom Boyle met and worked with through the Brown Refugee Youth Tutoring and Enrichment program. Lina fled Syria with her family at age ten and lived in Jordan before being resettled in the United States. The project’s final form will be a multimedia website combining seven podcasts of Lina narrating her transnational journey with collages of her photos and memories from each place she has lived. “To Steal a Dream” constitutes a critical intervention into media representations which position young, female refugees, Muslim women in particular, as perpetual victims in need of saving. In creating the project, Boyle is building on research she undertook as an Undergraduate Fellow in the 2018-19 Pembroke Seminar “What Are (Human) Rights? Imperial Origins, Curatorial Practices and Non-Imperial Ground.”

Lyle Cherneff ’21 won both the Ruth Simmons Prize in Gender and Women’s Studies and the Joan Wallach Scott Prize for an outstanding honors thesis in Gender and Sexuality Studies for “The Ties That Bind: Incest and Family-Making in the Postbellum South.” The thesis explores how the socially constructed idea of “home” as a safe place conflicts with the reality of nineteenth-century Southern households, which he identifies in his thesis as the locus of “an unprecedented explosion of domestic violence.” In the work, Lyle explores white patriarchy and incest, marriage regulation, the sexual and familial structure of the slave plantation, and miscegenation laws that persisted into the twentieth century.

In conferring both awards to the work, the prize committee commented, “Cherneff’s research advances our understanding of patriarchy, kinship, the roots of white supremacy, Southern jurisprudence, and intersubjective relations under slavery and in its aftermath through careful readings of case law, newspaper accounts, and letters. Discursive analysis of the figure of ‘home’ exposes its contradictory affective valences, the site at once of ideals of safety, security and privacy and of violence, confinement, and secrecy.”

It is very unusual for the Pembroke Center to give both prizes to the same thesis—in fact, this is the first time the Pembroke Center has done so. This speaks to the truly exceptional caliber of “The Ties That Bind: Incest and Family-Making in the Postbellum South.” While Lyle’s superlative thesis rose to the top this year, the judges were faced with an impossibly competitive pool of theses, and felt compelled to recognize the work of two additional undergraduate scholars whose theses they judged to be outstanding.

Gemma Sack ’21 was granted honorable mention for the Ruth Simmons Prize for her thesis “Selling Mrs. Procreator: Eugenics, Homemaking, and American Nationalism in Women’s Magazines, 1929-1939.” Bringing together several discursive threads—including gender, race, reproduction, and consumption—in a project drawing on historical, theoretical, scholarly, and popular sources, this thesis examines the interconnections of eugenics, domesticity, and the fortification of the American way of life in mass-market women’s magazines of the 1930s. The mutually reinforcing politics of home and nation during the interwar period are clearly evident, the thesis argues, in popular magazines targeting women as the reproducers of a particular ideological form of the family. 

The thesis by Cal Turner ’21, “The Virtue of the Virago: Gender-Crossing Difference and the Social Life of the Early Modern Female Crossdresser” was awarded honorable mention for the Ruth Simmons Prize for its insightful analysis of two seventeenth-century literary accounts of female crossdressing, one from England and the other written in Spain. This thesis understands female crossdressing not as an instrumental act or a narrative device, but as a mode of relational and social being in the world. Reading the female crossdresser as a profoundly social figure who develops routes toward relationship through the mark of difference that crossdressing constitutes, this thesis finds present-day trans resonances in a historical lineage of counternarratives of gendered existential states.

History and Africana studies concentrator Connor Jenkins ’22 was awarded the Barbara Anton Community Research Grant for his project “‘Fear gave speed to our steps’: Slavery’s Hauntings and the Long Lives of Plantation Geographies in Edenton, North Carolina from 1850 to 1880.” The grant supports undergraduate students doing an honors thesis involving community work related to the welfare of women and children. Describing his plan for this project, Connor said, “In 1861, Harriet Jacobs anonymously published her narrative about her escape from slavery. In the 1970s, historians located Jacobs’ enslavement in Edenton, North Carolina. To understand regional (mis-)remembering of slavery, I will map Edenton geographies and lineages pre-1865 and post-1865 through correspondence and newspapers. By interviewing Edentonians, I will investigate antebellum legacies in modern space and gender roles. This project simply asks: what changed in Edenton after emancipation? Much historiography considers slavery through geography and gender, yet local histories often omit these analytics. Calculated local forgetting of slavery undergirds spectacular insurrectionary activity and quotidian structural inequality, rendering this project urgent and timely."

 

Sabrina Bajwa ’21.5, a gender and sexuality studies and Hispanic studies concentrator, won the Helen Terry MacLeod Research Grant for her project “Reproductive (In)justice in Detention.” Describing her project, Sabrina said, “In September 2020, whistleblower Dawn Wooten drew attention to allegations of forced hysterectomies at Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia. Just two years prior, the Trump administration found itself embroiled in a legal battle as the Office of Refugee Resettlement denied pregnant minors’ access to abortion in detention. Through archival work, reviewing key court cases, and conducting interviews with current organizers, my research traces the historical incorporation of reproductive coercion within immigration politics to illuminate how these seemingly contradictory anti-birth and anti-abortion pushes exist simultaneously. In considering these examples in conversation, I highlight the creative efforts of activists in urging for a reproductive justice-based movement to dismantle the white supremacy underlying the convergence of reproductive coercion and anti-immigration politics.”

Dr. Whitney Arey, who completed her PhD in the Department of Anthropology at Brown this spring as well as a graduate certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies, won the Marie J. Langlois Dissertation Prize for “Abortion as Care: Affective and Biosocial Experiences of Abortion Access and Decision-Making.”  The Langlois Prize recognizes an outstanding dissertation in areas related to gender studies or feminist analysis, and confers a $1000 honorarium.

The dissertation, which is based on 18 months of ethnographic field research that Arey conducted in and around two abortion clinics in her home state of North Carolina, considers how the politicized space of the abortion clinic makes possible novel forms of care.

Describing her work, Arey says, “I argue that this politicization makes the formation of temporary biosocial relationships with strangers possible. I explore the role that family, friends, partners, healthcare workers, and anti-abortion protesters play in abortion access. I show how patients’ already constrained access abortion care is made possible by, and sometimes made more difficult by, their relationships with others.”

Arey conducted her ethnographic research during a time when North Carolina and a number of other states were passing numerous laws to restrict abortion access. Daniel Jordan Smith, professor of anthropology, Charles C. Tillinghast ’32 Professor of International Studies, and Arey’s dissertation advisor, described the dissertation as grounded in empirical observation and informed by cutting-edge theory. She created “a contextually-grounded account and a nuanced understanding of an issue about which conventional narratives provide simplistic, black-and-white interpretations,” Smith said.

Katherine A. Mason, Vartan Gregorian Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Brown and Arey’s mentor, concurred: “Whitney’s dissertation is a transformative account of abortion in the US that gets away from tired conversations about personal choice and personal responsibility, and instead shows us how abortion decisions, procedures, and recovery – as well as the meaning that people make of these experiences – are the results of complex negotiations between the pregnant person and a number of other parties.”

Arey, who is a 2020-21 Interdisciplinary Fellow at the Pembroke Center and was the head teaching assistant for the Gender and Sexuality Studies program course “Introduction to Gender and Sexuality Studies,” charted new territory by attending to the conversations that women considering an early, routine abortion have with their partners and with other family members and friends as they make the decision about whether to have an abortion or not, according to Smith, and her dissertation promises to make significant contributions to scholarship on the anthropology of reproduction, the anthropology of bioethics, and to broader humanistic studies of gender, ethics, kinship, and violence.

Led by the Nancy L. Buc ’65 Pembroke Center Archivist Mary Murphy and Assistant Archivist Amanda Knox, the Pembroke Center Archives grew in size and stature over the past year.

Despite the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic and remote working conditions, the Pembroke Center Archives added 13 archival and addenda collections, including the papers of Cheryl A. Wall and Hazel V. Carby. Wall was a scholar who widened the scope of literary scholarship to include Black novelists, poets and nonfiction authors as well as essayists, whom she considered central to the Black literary tradition. Carby is considered a pioneer in Black feminism and is also known as one of the world's leading scholars on race, gender, and African-American issues. Both of these collections are of tremendous interest to scholars, and enlarge the community of collections by Black feminist scholars that comprise the curatorial arm of the Pembroke Center’s Black Feminist Theory Project.

New collections and addenda:

Feminist Theory Archive

Lauren Berlant papers (addenda)

Ellen Chesler papers (new collection)

Miriam Cooke papers (addenda)

Sandra G. Harding papers (addenda)

Virginia Held papers (addenda)

Florence Howe papers (partially pre-processed from the Hay)

Alison M. Jaggar papers (new collection)

Coppelia Kahn papers (addenda)

Louise Lamphere papers (addenda)

Felicity Nussbaum papers (new collection)

Elaine Showalter papers (new collection)

Cheryl A. Wall papers (new collection!)

 

Christine Dunlap Farnham Archive

Margaret Ellickson Senturia papers (new collection)

 

A longtime collaboration with Ann duCille, professor of English, Emerita at Wesleyan University and a visiting scholar in gender studies at the Pembroke Center, along with years of work nurturing relationships with scholars and the focused efforts of Summer Graduate Curatorial Proctors, has pushed the curatorial mission of the Black Feminist Theory Project forward, enabling the Pembroke Center Archives to preserve the legacy of these important scholars. The proctors, archives staff, and duCille work closely with scholars through every step of the process, from first discussions to collecting trips, all the way through making the collections available to researchers eager to learn from this rich field of scholarship.

See the Black Feminist Theory Collections.

Pembroke Center Archives proctorships provide apprenticeship-style training in archival curation, supporting student research and broadening their professional opportunities. Murphy worked with both Pembroke Center Graduate Curatorial Proctors for the BFTP and with the John Hay Library Research Fellowship program. She sat on the Hay Library’s spring selection committee and then served as a mentor for one of the awardees, Lillian Pickett '22, who used the fellowship to conduct research for her senior thesis that is examining the relationship between late 20th century women's groups in Rhode Island and the carceral state.

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 so that they can promote them to their researchers and use them in the classes they teach.

The Pembroke Center Archives also leads 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.

Between July 2020 and June 2021, archives staff recorded 24 oral histories and made 32 oral histories available to stream online. These include histories related to COVID-19, ongoing racial justice protests, anti-Asian racism, and much more. A highlight was the oral history Assistant Archivist Amanda Knox conducted with NASA astronaut Jessica U. Meir, class of 1999. Amanda worked with Jessica and her team to schedule the interview, learning the fun fact that gmail reaches outer space! Meir was generous with her time and shared great memories of both her time at Brown and her work with NASA.

After All: Traces of the Literary in Freud’s Moses and Monotheism (a Historical Novel) 

Nell Wasserstrom

 

Death and Fairy Tale: Queer Autothanatography in Claude Vivier 

Andrew Kingston

 

The Aesthetic Death Drive of Modernism 

Matthew Gannon

 

Anality in the Colonial Archive: Sigmund Freud and Roger Casement 

Andrew Ragni

 

Cruising the Jerusalem Light Rail 

Jake Silver

Editor’s Note 

Peter Szendy

 

Infinance, or Narration and Solvency 

Peter Szendy

 

Earning to Give 

Catherine Malabou

 

Life after Debt 

Arjun Appadurai

 

The Debt Chronotope 

Frederik Tygstrup

 

And Suddenly I Owed Nothing/Je ne devais plus rien 

Vincent Message; Cole Swensen

 

The Debt Narrative and the Credit Crunch of Democracy 

Emmanuel Bouju

 

The Utopia of Bankruptcy 

Raphaëlle Guidée

 

William Gaddis’s J R and the Many Faces of Junk Bonds 

Mikkel Krause Frantzen

 

Nigerian Writings (Fragments) 

Silvia Federici; Arlen Austin

 

How Much Is Your African Slave Worth? 

Anthony Bogues

 

Narrative and Strategy in Sovereign Debt 

Odette Lienau

Born Undead: Beyond Theory, World Theory

Miglena Nikolchina

 

The Den of Theoretical Monsters 

Darin Tenev

 

Regimes of Relevance: On Their Use for Literary Theory 

Bogdana Paskaleva

 

Literary Theory as Radical Historicism? 

Enyo Stoyanov

 

The Return to/of Theory 

Kamelia Spassova

 

Of Bugs and Masks: Regimes within Regimes 

Miglena Nikolchina

 

Exilic Inscriptions: Migration and the Resistance to (World) Theory 

Galin Tihanov

 

Dead Point of Translation: Otherness, Seduction, and Literary Theory 

Maria Kalinova

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 Fernandez ’93 

Yvonne P. Goldsberry ’82

Ryan G. W. Grubbs ’10

Tanya K. Hernández ’86, P’20

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

Joan Hoost McMaster ’60 

Leslie Newman ’75 AM’75, P’08, ’12

Lorine Pendleton ’91

Gwenn Masterman Snider ’83, P’13

Leah Sprague ’66

Shauna M. Stark ’76, P’10 

Irene Sudac ’81, P ’17

Judith Surkis ’92

Leora Tanenbaum ’91 

Kimberly Wachtler ’13

Donna Zaccaro ’83, P’19

 

Ex Officio

Nancy L. Buc ’65

Joan MacLeod Heminway ’83

Jean Howard ’70

Susan Adler Kaplan ’58 MAT’65

Anne Jones Mills ’60

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

Chelsey C. Remington ’61, P’89, ’92

Eileen Rudden ’72, P’03, P’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

 

All of us in Pembroke Center were deeply saddened by the loss of two members of our community in the past year: Chelsey C. Remington ’61, P’89, ’92, and Susan Adler Kaplan ’58 MAT’65.

See the 2021-2022 membership here.