Previous Workshops
Foundations of South Asian Studies
Emerging Practices in the Arts
Contemporary Europe
Feminist Research Alliance
- Faculty Coordinator: Kari Winter (Transnational Studies)
The Feminist Research Alliance seeks to advance and energize transnational feminist research in the 21st century by promoting interdisciplinary conversation and collaboration among UB’s rich array of feminist scholars and by extending our interconnections with other feminists regionally, nationally, and internationally. Our bi-weekly meetings, with lunch provided, 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.
The Feminist Research Alliance is sponsored by the Humanities Institute, the Gender Institute, the Canadian-American Studies Committee, the Julian Park Chair in Comparative Literature, and the Department of American Studies.
Feminist Research Alliance 2011-2012
Faculty Coordinator
- Kari Winter (Department of American Studies)
About the Workshop
The Feminist Research Alliance seeks to advance and energize transnational feminist research in the 21st century by promoting interdisciplinary conversation and collaboration among UB’s rich array of feminist scholars and by extending our interconnections with other feminists regionally, nationally, and internationally. Our bi-weekly meetings, with lunch provided, 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.
The Feminist Research Alliance is sponsored by the Humanities Institute, the Gender Institute, the Canadian-American Studies Committee, the Julian Park Chair in Comparative Literature, and the Department of American Studies.
Meeting Schedule
SPRING 2012 (Schedule-in-Progress)
February 15
Stacy Hunbbard (English) on Marianne Moore
March
Conference on Early Modern Masculinities organized by Christian Flaugh (Romance Languages and Literatures)
April
Panel discussion led by Trey Ufholcz (Social Work) regarding activism on campus for gender-neutral student housing
Also forthcoming: presentations by Gender Institute Dissertation Fellows Katie Grennell (American Studies) and Michael Hurst (English)
FALL 2011
Wednesday, September 14, Noon to 1:30
Location: Gender Institute, 207 Commons (UB North Campus)
“Bloodline/Bloodlust: Reading Race and Gender in Octavia Butler’s Fledgling“
Speaker: Toni Pressley-Sanon (African and African American Studies)
Wednesday, September 28, Noon to 1:30
Location: Gender Institute, 207 Commons (UB North Campus)
“From Body to Voice and Back: 20th Century Mexican Theatre”
Speaker: Margarita Vargas (Romance Languages and Literatures)
Saturday, October 15, 6PM
Location: Casa de Arte on Elmwood Avenue
“From Body to Voice and Back: 20th Century Mexican Theatre”
Featuring performances by actors (Lauren Gay, Elena Johnson, Isaac Johnson, Eva Juarros, Michael Raguso, and Sandra Roland), followed by a reception
Tuesday, October 25, Noon to 1:30
Location: Gender Institute, 207 Commons (UB North Campus)
“This Text Which is Not One: A Unity of Fragments in the Works of Shelley Jackson”
Speaker: Rae Muhlstock (English)
Commentator: John Edgar Browning (American Studies)
SPRING 2011
TH. February 3, 4 PM, Gender Institute, 207 Commons
Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, Comparative Literature
“Virginia Woolf’s Feminist Aesthetics: On the Political and Artistic Practice in A Room of One’s Own”
Wed. February 16, noon to 1:30, 1004 Clemens Hall
Gwynn Thomas, Global Gender Studies
“Regendering Politics and Culture in Chile”
Wed. February 23, noon to 1:30, 1004 Clemens Hall
Andrea Davis, Associate Professor of Humanities & Deputy Director of Center for Research on Latin America & the Caribbean, York University
“Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring”
This event is co-hosted by the Transamericas Research Workshop
TH. March 10, 4 PM, 509 O’Brian Hall
Karen E. Bravo, Professor of Law, Indiana University Law School, Indianapolis ”The Role of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in Contemporary Anti-Human Trafficking Discourse”
This event is co-hosted by the Baldy Center for Law & Social Policy
Wed, April 6, noon to 1:30, 1004 Clemens Hall
Ruth Goldman, American Studies & Media Study ”Bending the Frame & Pushing the Sound Wave: Shpaing a Feminist Film Practice”
Wed, April 13, noon to 1:30, 1004 Clemens Hall
David Squires, English ”On Ida B. Wells”
Wed, April 20, noon to 1:30, 1004 Clemens Hall
Michael Rembis, History and Disability Studies ”On Gender & Disability Studies”
FALL 2010
Wed. Sept. 22, noon to 1:30
Inaugural Lunch Meet & Greet, Gender Institute, 207 UB Commons, UB North Campus
Wed. Oct. 6, noon to 1:30
1004 Clemens Hall, UB North Campus Martha Malamud (Classics) (tentative date)
Fri. Oct. 15, noon to 1:30
1004 Clemens Hall, UB North Campus
Sharmistha Bagchi-Sen (Geography) Trina Hamilton (Geography)
“A Feminist Geographer Unravels Corporate Responsibilities” Wed. Nov. 3, noon to 1:30
1004 Clemens Hall, UB North Campus
Debi Street (Sociology) Mary Nell Trautner (Sociology)
“Physical Appearance Bias” Wed. Nov. 17, noon to 1:30
1004 Clemens Hall, UB North Campus
Carrie Bramen (English)
Debra Goodman (English)
“Theatricality in 19th-Century U.S. Women’s Writing” Wed. Dec. 1, noon to 1:30
1004 Clemens Hall, UB North Campus
Greg Dimitriadis (Educational Leadership & Policy) Sarah Robert (Learning and Instruction)
“Teacher’s Work and Global Education Reform: The Gendered Dimensions of Policy Production”
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.
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, a wildly popular and award-winning instructor of African and African American Studies, on 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 (with an interactive informational website to be published in Fall 2011) and hip hop culture. His course, Hip Hop & Social Issues, was the first of its kind at SUNY Buffalo. Bhardwaj’s forthcoming work, “Rap Gold In the Rust Belt,” interrogates how antecedents in hip hop may affect the descendents of the culture and investigates how social and political literacy may arise in expressions of hip hop. His classes and writing on hip hop identify relationships between so-called racial authenticity in hip hop and the transcendence of hegemony and racial identity politics. In this interview, Dr. Bhardwaj describes what it means to him to be a male feminist.
Click here for a transcript of the interview.
Graduate Group in Cultural Studies Research Workshop
Faculty Coordinator
- David Schmid (Department of English)
Graduate Student Coordinators
- Gil Bitely (Department of English)
- Al Larsen (Department of Media Studies)
- David Squires (Department of English)
About the Workshop
The primary purpose of the Research Workshop is to draw together the community of cultural studies scholars across disciplines at UB and in the community. Membership includes faculty, staff, and students from approximately fifteen UB departments. Our research engages a wide range of historical and contemporary theories and methods of cultural critique and practice, with a special interest in how those interventions contribute to contemporary shifts in redefining both culture and its study at the levels of the individual, the national, and the global.
Meeting Schedule
Rob Latham (Department of English, UC Riverside)
March 3, 2009 | “The Urban Question in New Wave Science Fiction”
Chris Carlsson (writer, multimedia and graphic designer, political activist) November 6, 2009 | “Nowtopia: How Pirate Programmers, Outlaw Bicyclists, and Vacant-Lot Gardeners are Inventing the Future Today!”
Linda Williams (Departments of Film Studies and Rhetoric, UC Berkeley)
March 26, 2010 | “Pornography, Porno, Porn: Thoughts on a Weedy Field” [Keynote for “At the Limit: Pornography and the Humanities”]
Research Workshop for Queer Theory
Faculty Coordinator
- Tim Dean (Department of English)
Graduate Student Coordinator
- Leah Benedict (Department of English)
About the Workshop
The Research Workshop for Queer Theory interrogates identity and the normalizing technologies of power that pathologize other forms of sociality, subjectivity, embodiment, and erotic practice. At the same time, it renders queer theory itself as an object of critical inquiry. As such, we will focus on thinking through its recurrent problems and limitations, on developing nascent forms of queer critique, and on placing queer theory in conversation with other theoretical discourses. We see a highly interdisciplinary workshop, comprised of not only those familiar with queer theory but also those coming to it for the first time, as necessary for the success and longevity of such a project.
Meeting Schedule
“At the Limit: Pornography and the Humanities” (conference)
March 26-27, 2010 | Featured Speakers: Robert Caserio (Department of English, Pennsylvania State University); Harri Kalha (Department of Art History, University of Helsinki); Mireille Miller-Young (Department of Feminist Studies, UC Santa Barbara); Hoang Tan Nguyen (Department of English, Bryn Mawr College); Zabet Patterson (Department of Art, SUNY Stony Brook); John Paul Ricco (Centre for Visual and Media Culture, U of Toronto); Linda Williams (Department of Film and Rhetoric, UC Berkeley)
Jasbir Puar (Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, Rutgers)
January 29, 2009 | “Prognosis Time: Towards a Geopolitics of Affect,Debility, and Capacity”
Siobhan Somerville (Departments of English and Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
April 6, 2009 | “Queering the Immigrant Romance: Naturalization, Imperialism, and the Performance of U. S. Citizenship”
Steven Miller (Department of English, UB)
February 28, 2008 | “Literature and the Right to Marriage”
Tim Dean (Department of English, UB) March 27, 2008 | “Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking”
Michael Snediker (Department of English, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario)
October 8, 2008 | “Jack Spicer’s Billy the Kid: Faking the Personal”
Islam and the West Research Workshop (NEW in Fall 2011)
Faculty Coordinator
- Tilman Lanz (Department of Anthropology)
About the Workshop
This is a new workshop initiative, bringing together faculty and graduate students from a variety of disciplines. Its principal goal is to examine important issues of common interest to Muslims and non-Muslims in their historical trajectories, their contemporary manifestations, and their future implications. These issues include but are not limite to: the long-term consequence of 9/11 on relations between Muslims and non-Muslims; transnational links of Muslims in the West; the development of a diasporic Islam in the Western world; the recent transformation of leadership in Muslim Middle Eastern countries such as Tunisia, Bahrain, Libya, and Egypt; the spiritual dimension of Islam (Sufism) and its appeal to Westerners; the relationship between terrorism and Islam.
Events
Thursday, February 2, 4:30PM
“Secularism, Democracy, and the Arab Spring: New Definitions Needed ”
Presenter: Professor John Voll (Georgetown Univ.)
Location:Fillmore Hall, Room 352, UB North Campus
Friday, February 3, 10:30AM
“Politics & Islam in South East Asia ”
Presenter: Professor John Voll (Georgetown Univ.)
Location: Fillmore Hall, Room 352, UB North Campus
PAST EVENTS
Wednesday, October 5, 4:30PM
“Defining Islam in West Java”
Presenter: Amanda Buonopane
Location: Anthropology Department Conference Area, MFAC 380, Ellicott Complex
In recent years, the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community in Indonesia has been the object of fierce debate in the public sphere of Java. This debate has occurred in the midst of calls for religious tolerance and demands of respect for the fundamentals of the majority religion, Sunni Islam. Anti-Ahmadi rhetoric claims that Ahmadis believe in a prophet who came after Mohammed, a notion seen to challenge the precept of Mohammed’s perfection and finality of prophethood. With the accusation that Ahmadis are heretics, anti-Ahmadi Muslims have conducted public demonstrations in large numbers and petitioned the government for a ban on any and all religious practices of this group.Countries such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have previously issued official declarations that Ahmadis are non-Muslim and the situation in Indonesia is seeing calls from majority Muslim organizations for Ahmadis to stop referring to their religion as part of Islam.
This talk will focus on the issue of religious authenticity and its relation to tolerance in west Java, examining the larger problem of defining Islam. The attempt to define what is Islam is at the center of ongoing debate in the study of this field, creating interesting theoretical challenges for the broader study of religion. Furthermore, the ways that Islam is defined in local or transnational public contexts creates dilemmas for those who are marginalized by those definitions. The talk will address how these theoretical and theological problems of definition converge in unavoidable ways for the researcher interested in topics such as the Ahmadiyya situation in Java.
