Feminist Research Alliance Workshop
The Feminist Research Alliance Workshop seeks to advance and energize transnational feminist research in the 21st century by promoting interdisciplinary conversation and collaboration among feminist scholars locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally.
Our bi-weekly luncheon meetings offer opportunities for faculty and graduate students to discuss their research, explore key texts of classic and emerging feminisms, and develop research and teaching collaborations. The workshop also provides chances for graduate students and junior faculty to meet potential committee members or mentors beyond the boundaries of their home departments.
Spring 2013 Events
Wednesday, January 30, noon to 1:30 at the Gender Institute, 207 UB Commons
Laura Garofalo Khan, Architecture & Planning
“Messing with Eden”
Addressing historical and contemporaneous perceptions of pristine wilderness and Arcadian landscape as well as current analysis of what we recognize as our socio- ecological context, this talk highlights the garden as a generative construct. The architecture of the garden makes it into an interface where the boundaries between nature and the man-made are negotiated. I will focus on the design of a group of contemporary gardens physically set in a site known for both the 18th century Romantic garden constructed by Canadian landscape matriarch Elyse Reford, and its adjacent nature preserve untouched since colonial times. The confluence of these three diverse insertions in the landscape, the wilderness, the romantic landscape, and the temporary garden proposes an alternative ecological imagination for design and a counterpoint to the nature/culture dichotomy underpinning not only architecture practice, but the construction of most econarratives.
Wednesday, February 6, noon to 1:30 at the Gender Institute, 207 UB Commons
Krishni Burns, Classics
"Meetings at the Temple: Locating Women in Ancient Rome’s Urban
Landscape"
The women of Republican Rome, with a few notable exceptions, supposedly lived extremely cloistered lives. They were confined exclusively to the domestic sphere and their identity was dependent on either their fathers or husbands. This presentation offers an expanded view of women’s public lives during the mid to late Roman Republic by exploring to possibility that women used the courtyard of the temple to the Goddess known as the Magna Mater to conduct public business such as planning political protests and holding meetings of women's social organizations.
Tuesday, February 19, noon to 1:30 at the Gender Institute, 207 UB Commons
Jess MacNamara, Sociology
"Rearticulating Beauty Norms: Gender Transition, Appearance, and Family Acceptance"
Family has been mostly absent from studies on transgender issues, yet their influence is undeniable. Beauty is central to trans narratives about families accepting, supporting, and rejecting gendered physical changes. Appearance is the crux of gender transition, with the goal of aligning the physical with a powerful sense of inner self. This presentation draws from 30 in-depth interviews with self-identified transgender women and men to highlight the role of physical appearance in shaping familial acceptance.
Wednesday, March 6, noon to 1:30 at the Gender Institute, 207 UB Commons
Leah Benedict, English
"Performing Impotence"
From the convergence of law, medicine and popular culture, male sexual failure emerged as a defining characteristic of masculine subjectivity. "Impotence" was an idea rapidly exchanged through the marketplace of ideas in the long eighteenth century, creating a slew of new anxieties, inhibitions and confessional modes. While divorce trials demanded that husbands demonstrate their potency before a jury, accredited physicians and quack doctors peddled a range of sometimes-deadly cures for sexual dissatisfaction. Meanwhile, playwrights, poets, novelists and pamphlet-writers incorporated the legal and physiological markers of impotence into their works to create a new "type" of substandard man. "Performing Impotence" considers bodies obliged to enact their own failure on the stage and in the courtroom.
Wednesday, March 27, noon to 1:30 at the Gender Institute, 207 UB Commons
Carrie Tirado Bramen, English
"On the Racial Politics of Niceness: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Plantation"
Fall 2012 Events
Wednesday, Sept. 12, noon to 1:30 p.m. at the Gender Institute, 207 UB Commons
Jane E. Fisher, Director of Women’s Studies & Assoc. Professor of English, Canisius College
"Disease's Power to Expand Subjectivity: Representing the 1918 Influenza Pandemic in Buchi Emecheta's The Slave Girl and Elechi Amadi's The Great Ponds"
Tuesday, Sept. 25, noon to 1:30 at the Gender Institute, 207 UB Commons
Victoria Wolcott, UB History
“Anatomy of a Hunger Strike: Eroseanna Robinson and Radical Nonviolence”
Tuesday, October 16, 4:00-5:30 p.m. at the Gender Institute, 207 UB Commons
Molly Ranahan, UB Urban Planning
“Interrogating the Notion of Queer Spaces: An Examination of Urban
Spaces, Queer Users, and Urban Planning and Design Practices”
The built environment expresses values concerning sexuality through its design, composition, and management. The ways in which these spaces are created and controlled impact the way users feel and act. To understand the implications of heteronomormativity on the construction and management of space, it is important to observe and understand user experiences. The “sexing” of the built environment is a concept through which to begin developing a greater understanding of queer users and queer space and the impact that planners and designers have on these communities and environments in urban settlements.
Thursday, Oct. 18, 4:00 p.m. Clemens 120
Gender Week Keynote Address by Robert Pogue Harrison
Rosina Pierotti Professor of Italian Literature, Stanford University
“Landscape and Sanity”
The flyer for Harrison's talk can be found here.
Wednesday, Oct. 31, noon to 1:30 at the Gender Institute, 207 UB Commons
Jean Dickson, UB Libraries
"Felicita Vestvali and Transatlantic Feminism in the 19th Century"
Felicita Vestvali (ca. 1830-1880), despite her Italian stage name, was
a Polish-German opera singer and actress who was known in North
America as "Vestvali the Magnificent." Although a major attraction wherever
she performed, she is nearly forgotten today. This presentation focuses on her life as a self-described "man-hater" and an ambitious theatrical star, as well as her direct and mostly
indirect links with the feminist movement, the nascent movement for gay and lesbian rights, and the movements for racial and religious emancipation.
The Feminist Research Alliance Workshop is sponsored by UB's Humanities Institute, the Gender Institute, and the Center for Disability Studies.
UB Graduate Students Interview Feminist Faculty
Kamaria Busby, an M.A. student in American Studies,
interviewed Professor Alexis De Veaux (Global Gender Studies) on February 8, 2011.
An internationally acclaimed artist-activist-scholar, Professor De Veaux is the author of a major biography of Audre Lorde and several award-winning works of fiction. In this interview, she highlights a few aspects of her life and work from her childhood in Harlem to her scholarly specialization in Black diasporic women’s literatures. She says she teaches “out of my passion, because what I want my students to come away with, particularly, is a sense of the centrality of black women’s literary production, black women’s intellectual production, to larger discourses about what it means to be human, what it means to live in one’s time, what it means to be able to transgress time, what it means to be central to the project of social justice.”
Click here for a transcript of the interview.
Rachel Snyder Lockman, an M.A. student in UB’s English Department, interviewed
Lucinda M. Finley, Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs and the Frank Raichle Professor of Law,
on March 2, 2011.
Professor Finley’s research into how the male serves as the normative has led her to look at “tort law from a feminist perspective.” She asks: “To what extent are they [laws] not objective? To what extent are the laws framed to male needs? I found that, although there were not intentional biases, the laws didn’t fit women’s needs as well as men’s. This is especially true with tort law and what constitutes damage.”
Click here for a transcript of the interview.
Christine Ditzel, a Ph.D. student in American Studies,
interviewed Lois Weis, SUNY Distinguished Professor of
Educational Leadership and Policy, Graduate
College of Education,on February 1, 2011.
In this interview Professor Weis illuminates key issues in the underfunding of
American schools at the same time that she exemplifies an empowering
feminist praxis as a mentor of graduate students.
Click here for a transcript of the interview.
Beth Kuberka, a doctoral student in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, interviewed Carrie Tirado Bramen, Associate Professor of English and Executive Director of UB’s Humanities Institute on February 4, 2011.
In this interview, Professor Bramen describes the awakening of her passion for critical theory and archival research. She challenges each new generation of scholars to value the humanities as “a living archive of knowledges that have to be sustained . . . . The humanities have to challenge the market economy rather than try to assimilate to its rules.”
Click here for a transcript of the interview.
Jennifer Loft, an M.A. student in Global Gender Studies,
interviewed Susan Cahn, Professor of History, on February 8, 2011.
In this interview, Professor Cahn describes the emergence of her interests in women and sports, southern women's history, and feminist studies. She urges emerging feminist scholars to work hard, be true to themselves, and love what they do.
Click here for a transcript of the interview.
Kayla Chan, an M.A. student in Global Gender Studies,
interviewed Dr. Kush Bhardwaj on February 24, 2011.
Dr. Bhardwaj's research and teaching interests include Afro-diasporic cultural retentions in the United States vis-à-vis Ghana, resurrecting the socio-political significance of radical abolitionist John Brown and hip hop culture. In this interview, Dr. Bhardwaj describes what it means to him to be a male feminist.
Click here for a transcript of the interview.
CHECK BACK FOR UPCOMING 2012 EVENTS
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Event Archive: Spring 2012
Wednesday, February 15
Stacy Hubbard (English)
“Marianne Moore's National/Natural Histories”
Noon to 1:30, Clemens 1004
The modernist American poet, Marianne Moore, was an avid student of natural
history whose reading and lecture notes reveal wide knowledge of ornithology,
zoology, botany, garden design, and art historical depictions of plants and animals.
In her poems about American places, she often raises questions ofnational history
and politics through descriptions of nature. This talk will focus on the ways that
Moore's poems invite reconsideration of the sexual and racial politics of America's founding through depictions of restored gardens and grounds at national historical
sites such as Jamestown and Williamsburg.
Friday, February 24
Roundtable on Early Modern Masculinities
Noon - 5:00 p.m., Park 532
Organized by Christian Flaugh (Romance Languages and Literatures) and
cosponsored by the Early Modern Research Workshop
This round-table discussion will investigate the struggles and the anxieties generated
by the attempt at constructing a successful model of manhood and selfhood through
an interdisciplinary analysis of representations of masculinity. The presenters will
explore the ambivalence around representations of masculinity as located in various spaces and discourses in the early modern period. They will also signal paramount questions of early modern selfhood such as what constituted the period’s notion of
male identities, what practices and narratives were designated as masculine, and ultimately what were the real steaks of constructing masculinity in the various
realms of the early modern world.
Click here for Schedule
Thursday, March 8
Presentations by Gender Institute
Dissertation Fellows
Noon to 1:30, Norton 9
Katie Grennell (American Studies) on
gender, disability & American popular music
Michael Hurst (English), “Heroic Slave Bodies: Epic Masculinity and Transcendence in Frederick Douglass”
Friday, March 23,
Noon to 1:30
Regina Mason and Rhonda Brace
“Searching for Ancestors: Extraordinary Discoveries”
After years of searching for her family roots, Rhonda Brace of Springfield,
Massachusetts discovered that her ancestor, Jeffrey Brace, had published a memoir
of slavery in 1810. Ms. Brace then worked with Professor Kari Winter, the editor of
The Blind African Slave; or Memoirs of Boyrereau Brinch, Nicknamed Jeffrey Brace
(University of Wisconsin Press, 2005) to gather more information about the Brace
family’s history in New England from the Civil War to the present.
After years of searching for her family roots, Regina Mason of San Francisco,
California discovered that her ancestor, William Grimes, had published a memoir of
slavery in 1825. Ms. Mason formed a partnership with Professor William L. Andrews and
devoted years of research to produce a new edition of Life of William Grimes,
the Runaway Slave (Oxford University Press, 2008). Meeting each other for the
first time, these two women will share their unique stories of genealogical
research and academic collaborations.
Respondents: Barbara Nevergold, Uncrowned Queens Institute
Christopher Lee, Instructor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication,
University of Western Ontario
Candice Reynolds-Lee, sculptor from western Ontario who is a descendant of
Jeffrey Brace and several other remarkable ancestors
Thursday, April 5, 2012
GENDER-NEUTRAL HOUSING AT UB:
BREAKING THROUGH THE BINARY OF
TRADITIONAL CAMPUS LIVING
Gender Institute, 207 The Commons
Join us for this panel discussion led by:
Trey Ufholcz, the 2011-12 M.S.W. intern with the Gender Institute
and members of the UB Student Advocacy Group for
Gender-Neutral Housing (GNH) at UB:
Ethan A. Gibson, Ph.D. Candidate Electrical Engineering and
Anderson Starrantino, first year student and future Nursing major
In January, UB decided to implement a Gender-Neutral
Housing Policy, starting in Fall 2012. Trey Ufholcz researched
current GNH policies at sister SUNY campuses and at colleges
across the U.S., and wrote the literature review on GNH
for the UB Campus Life Proposal for GNH.
April 12 - April 13, 2012
Gender Across Borders Symposium:
Arts, Action, Activism
Event Archive: Fall 2011
September 27, 2011
Victoria Wolcott (History) will introduce
Toni Pressley-Sanon (African and African American Studies)
Bloodline/Bloodlust: Reading Race and Gender in Octavia Butler's Fledgling
Noon to 1:30
207 UB Commons – Gender Institute
Carine Mardorossian (English) will introduce
Margarita Vargas (Romance Languages and Literatures)
From Body to Voice and Back: 20th- Century Mexican Theatre
THIS PAPER WILL BE RE-PRESENTED
Saturday, October 15, 2011
Casa de Arte
141 Elmwood Ave, Buffalo
More information
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Rae Muhlstock (English)
This Text Which is Not One: A Unity of Fragments in the Works of Shelley Jackson