Barnard Center for Research on Women: SEPTEMBER EVENTS

The Center for Research on Women at Barnard College hosts a number of engaging lectures, panel discussions and conferences.

The Helen Pond McIntyre '48 Lecture
Rethinking Nature Vs. Nurture
A lecture with Anne Fausto-Sterling
Thursday, 14 September, 5:30 PM
James Room, 4th Floor Barnard Hall
Free & open to the public; no reservations required.
"Only our beliefs about gender - not science - can define our sex. Furthermore, our beliefs about gender affect what kinds of knowledge scientists produce about sex in the first place."
Anne Fausto-Sterling has forever changed the way we think about gender, sex, and science. Her groundbreaking studies, Myths of Gender and Sexing the Body, invite us to trouble convenient and long-held scientific "truths" as they reveal the inextricable connections between biological knowledge and social/political forces that seek and shape it. On Thursday, 14 September, Anne Fausto-Sterling joins us to share her newest research on how bone development in boys and girls translates into behavioral differences: it's a fascinating and important vantage point for viewing the complex relationship between bodies and the cultures they inhabit. You won't want to miss it.
Anne Fausto-Sterling is Professor of Biology & Gender Studies at Brown University. The recipient of numerous academic honors and grants in both the sciences and humanities, she is the author of dozens of publications in developmental genetics and ecology, which have succeeded not only in challenging entrenched scientific beliefs but also in drawing the general public into the conversation.
Established in 2004 in honor of Barnard alumnae Helen Pond McIntyre, '48, the McIntyre lectureship highlights the work of scholars who have made extraordinary contributions to the field of Women's Studies. Having recently explored the work of feminist icon Catharine Stimpson and legal scholar Patricia Williams, we now turn to one of today's most influential scientists, Anne Fausto-Sterling, who's forever changed how we think about biology, culture, and the relationship between the two.
The Center wishes to thank Barnard alumnae, trustee emerita, and longtime Center friend Eleanor Thomas Elliott, whose generous gift makes this lecture series possible.

Lunchtime Lecture Series
Feminism in Motion:
Sugar Salon & the Social Conscience of Dance
A lecture and performance with Mary Cochran
Wednesday, 20 September, Noon
Altschul Atrium, Altschul Hall
Free & open to the public; no reservations required.

"Dance," writes Professor Mary Cochran, "is always the poorest stepsister of all of the arts because it involves the body and is also considered 'feminine.'" In this way, it reflects larger and more insidious social trends wherein women's work and women's bodies are grossly devalued. Sadly, it comes as little surprise to consider that, although women choreographers founded American modern dance, it is their male counterparts who receive the most lucrative grants, the most prolonged media attention, and the most exciting career opportunities.

Sugar Salon is a cooperative project between Barnard's Department of Dance and the Williamsburg Art neXus that aims not only to raise public awareness of gender inequity in modern dance, but also to create career-building opportunities for women. On Tuesday, 20 September, join us for a rare lunchtime lecture and performance with Mary Cochran, whose work testifies to the achievements that are possible through the cathartic, political and intellectual art form of modern dance.

Chair and Artistic Director of the Barnard Department of Dance, Mary Cochran has performed and taught on every continent (except Antarctica). Ms. Cochran's professional career began at eighteen as a member of Nikolais Dance Theatre, and continued as a soloist with Paul Taylor Dance Company. She currently performs in highly theatrical works by Sara Hook, and creates and performs her own text-based monologues.

Gender and the Politics of Pleasure
In Early Modern Sugar-Work
A lecture with Kim Hall
Tuesday, 26 September, Noon
BCRW, 101 Barnard Hall
Free & open to the public; no reservations required.

England's accelerated access to sugar in the seventeenth century coincided with radical political changes: regicide, civil war and the Restoration all invest acts of sugar consumption with powerful political and symbolic weight. Focusing on the first English plantation manual, Richard Ligon's True and Exact History of Barbados, Kim Hall examines the intersections of gender, royalty, and race in narratives of English consumption in the seventeenth century.

Kim F. Hall is currently a Visiting Professor of English and Acting Director of Africana Studies at Barnard. She has lectured nationally and internationally on Shakespeare, race theory and racial formation, renaissance women writers, visual arts, and pedagogy. Her first book, Things of Darkness was the first to bring together black feminist theory and early modern studies. This groundbreaking work on racial discourses in sixteenth and seventeenth century Britain helped generate a new wave of scholarship on race in Shakespeare and Renaissance/Early Modern texts. Having recently finished her second book, Othello: Texts and Contexts (forthcoming), she is currently working on a study of sugar, Sweet Taste of Empire, which investigates the roles of women, labor and race in the Anglo-Caribbean sugar trade during the seventeenth century.

Josephine Baker:
A Century in the Spotlight
An international, interdisciplinary colloquium
Friday, 29 September - Sunday, 1 October
Pre-registration is recommended. To register or for more information, visit www.josephinebaker2006.com.
"Surely the day will come when color means nothing more than skin tone, when religion is seen uniquely as a way to speak one's soul; when birth places have the weight of a throw of the dice and all men are born free, when understanding breeds love and brotherhood."
- Josephine Baker

For many of us, Josephine Baker will always be the reigning queen of Paris in the Jazz Age, the exotic face of French burlesque. But when we look beyond the kiss-curl and the banana skirt and the diamond-collared pet leopard, we see a woman whose life transcended those iconic performances in important and still illuminating ways. Born in the American Midwest, Baker began her career on the vaudeville circuit, made her way to New York during the heady days of the Harlem Renaissance, and then journeyed to interwar France, where her erotic dancing at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées rocketed her to stardom. Baker's position as an American expatriate, her manipulation of a burgeoning jazz aesthetic, her embodiment of "new womanhood," and her commitment to securing civil rights in both Europe and the United States lend us priceless insight into the nature of celebrity and performance, the meanings of racial emancipation and exploitation, and the transformative relationship between art and politics.

The Center is pleased to join conference organizers Kaiama Glover and Farah Jasmine Griffin, and their respective departments, the French Department and Africana Studies Program at Barnard College, and the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University, in presenting a three-day, interdisciplinary colloquium celebrating the centenary of this remarkable woman. We invite you to join an international assembly of scholars, filmmakers, dancers and choreographers, and biographers in whose vivid portrait of "The Black Venus" we see the whole of the twentieth century reflected.

Additional co-sponsors include: The Center for French and Francophone Studies/Maison française at Columbia University, The Sterling Currier Fund, The Florence Gould Foundation, The Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Columbia University, and The Studio Museum in Harlem.

To register or for more information, visit www.josephinebaker2006.com.
See http://www.barnard.edu/bcrw/ for a description of upcoming Fall 2006 events.