Friday, September 29, 2017

A Message from WGS Director Cati Connell on Program Publications & Events!

Photo: WGS/BU
Here are some announcements from the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program!

- Associate Professor Keith Vincent (World Languages and Literature & WGS) participated in a “translation slam” during the PEN World Voices Festival in New York in May, where he went head-to-head with fellow translator Janine Beichman to translate a poem by the feminist poet Hiromi Ito, who offered her commentary on the translations. Together with Catherine Yeh of BU’s Center for the Study of Asia, Vincent has organized a symposium to take place this October 12 & 13 on “Haiku as World Literature.” The website for the symposium, with titles and abstracts, can be found here: http://www.bu.edu/wll/news/shiki-birthday-symposium/. With help from a former student, he has also digitized 145 back issues of a Japanese journal devoted to research on Masaoka Shiki, which can now be found on Open BU.
- Assistant Professor Christopher Schmitt (Anthropology, Biology, & WGS) spent the summer studying vervet monkeys in South Africa, where he also presented research at the Primate Evolution and Genetics Group conference in Blyde Canyon. He has had two papers recently accepted for publication in the journal Nature Genetics - one on genetic variation and gene expression across developmental stages in vervet monkeys, and another on population adaptations to simian immunodeficiency virus in wild vervets. He will serve as discussant for the upcoming American Anthropological Association Roundtable “Anthropology Matters: Fighting essentialist ideas about poverty, race, and intelligence in the Trump Era.”
- Associate Professor Carrie Preston’s (English & WGS) book, Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, and Journeys in Teaching (Columbia University Press, 2016) was a finalist for the Modernist Studies Association (MSA) book prize.
- Professor Linda McClain (BU Law & WGS) was a Laurence S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellow at Princeton’s Center for Human Values in 2016. She also signed a contract with Oxford for her upcoming book, Bigotry, Conscience, and Marriage: Past and Present Controversies and will be presenting at a conference titled Fifty Years of Loving v. Virginia and the Continued Pursuit of Racial Equality on November 3, 2017.
- WGS will be co-sponsoring this year’s BU Eve Sedgwick Memorial Lecture, given this year by Dean Spade on March 29, 2018.
- Associate Professor Catherine Connell (Sociology & WGS) published two articles about her current research on gender and sexuality policy change in the US military: one in the journal Sexualities titled "Different Than An Infantry Unit Down In Georgia’: Metronormativity in the Homophobia Narratives of Boston Area ROTC Cadets” and another in Sociology Compass called "Now That We Can Ask and Tell: The Social Movement Legacy of the DADT Repeal”. She also published another article in Sociological Forum titled "Contesting Racialized Discourses of Homophobia”.
- Assistant Professor Yoon Sun Yang (World Languages and Literatures & WGS) published her first book, From Domestic Women to Sensitive Young Men: Translating the Individual in Early Colonial Korea in July 2016 (Harvard University Press).
- Barbara Gottfried (WGS) presented a paper titled “No Holds Barred: Millennial Provocations in Women’s Stand-Up Comedy” at The Seventeenth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders, and Sexualities, June 2, 2017 at Hofstra University.
- Assistant Professor Anthony Petro (Religion & WGS) published an article titled "Ray Navarro's Jesus Camp, AIDS Activist Video, and the 'New Anti-Catholicism'" in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion.
- Associate Professor Ashley Mears published an article from her fieldwork on modeling in Russia in the journal Poetics called "Locating local knowledge in global networks: Scouting in fashion and football”.
- Assistant Professor Ashley Farmer’s (History, African American Studies, and WGS) new book, Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era (UNC Press), will be out on November 13th.
- WGS held a roundtable discussion on the legal, structural, and stigma-related restrictions on reproductive justice with BU faculty members Bayla Ostrich (Medical Anthropology & Cross Cultural Practice, School of Medicine), Khiara Bridges (BU Law & Anthropology), and special guest Professor Carol Sanger (Columbia Law) on April 3, 2017.
- Sarah Ihmoud (Post-doc in Anthropology & WGS) had a paper accepted for publication in the forthcoming issue of Cultural Anthropology. Co-authored with a collective of feminist anthropologists, the paper examines field researchers' experiences with racialized, gendered forms of violence. Sarah will be participating in a roundtable at the upcoming American Anthropological Association annual meeting on "Sexual Violence in Anthropology" hosted by the Association for Feminist Anthropology. She will also be presenting a film installation at the upcoming NWSA meeting titled "Moving Towards Home: The Feminist Imaginary from Palestine to M4BL”.   
- Assistant Professor Jennie Row published an article in the ASAP/Journal special issue on "Queer Form" about the Versailles sculptures of Jean-Michel Othoniel, early modern dance, and embodiment/anality. Another article, "Queer Time on the Early Modern Stage: France and the Drama of Biopower" appeared in the journal Exemplaria: Medieval, Early Modern,Theory. She was a 2016-17 Solmsen Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and she also organized a colloquium on "Show and Tell: Evidence, Erotics, and Embodiment in the Premodern World" at Madison. This year, she will continue her work as an alumna ambassador recruiting under-represented minority scholars for the Andover Institute for the Recruitment of Teachers, a program that encourages diversity in higher education.