Gender, Race, and History

Dr. Hannah Rosen (IRWG)

IRWG’s Program on Gender, Race, and History aims to promote interdisciplinary explorations of gender, race, and their historical nexus. We engage and develop scholarship that emphasizes historical perspectives on—and experiments with novel approaches to— “intersectionality, ” that is, the interlocking and mutually constitutive nature of various modes of identity and power.

Study Group

Gender, Race, and History sponsors a study group for faculty and graduate students. The group builds conversations in and across the humanities, social sciences, and the professional schools on feminist thinking about race.

In May, 2011, the study group sponsored an intensive seminar, entitled “Revisiting Intersectionality. ” The aim of this seminar was to return to the founding texts that first defined the concept of “intersectionality, ” to explore steps subsequently taken as theories of intersectionality evolved in conversation with a number of fields and theoretical approaches (including colonial and postcolonial studies and poststructuralism), and then to examine the directions contemporary work—for instance, in queer, critical race, and disability studies—is taking as scholars search for new ways to conceptualize the complex workings of identity and power.

Speaker Series

In winter, 2010, and fall, 2011, the program held a speaker series, entitled “Shifting Frames: New Perspectives on African American Women’s and Gender History, ” in which five historians (Thavolia Glymph, Duke University; Danielle McGuire, Wayne State University; Cynthia Blair, University of Illinois-Chicago; Ann Holder, Pratt Institute; and Leslie Schwalm, University of Iowa) presented work that challenges conventional narratives of key moments and themes in US history by focusing on African American women as well as gendered and racial meanings.

In 2011–12, the program plans to host the following additional lectures:

Lecture by Laurie Green, Associate Professor of History, University of Texas, Austin Monday, October 24, 2011

Professor Green, currently a fellow at the School for Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, is the author of Battling the Plantation Mentality: Memphis and the Black Freedom Struggle. Professor Green will speak about the gendered dimensions of her current research project, “ The Discovery of Hunger in America: The Politics of Race, Poverty, and Malnutrition after the Fall of Jim Crow.” (This event is cosponsored by the Center for the History of Medicine.)

Lecture by Estelle Freedman, Robinson Professor of United States History, Stanford University, Spring, 2012 (Please see IRWG Calendar of Events for exact date.)

Prof. Freedman, a founder of the Program in Feminist Studies at Stanford University, has published countless articles and books in the fields of US women’s history, the history of sexuality, and LGBT history. She is the author of Their Sister’s Keepers: Women’s Prison Reform in America, 1830-1930; Maternal Justice: Miriam Van Waters and the Female Reform Tradition; and most recently, No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women. She is the coauthor of Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America and the editor of The Essential Feminist Reader. She will present from her current research on the politics of rape in the United States, comparing white and black women's responses to sexual violence.

The program is also designing a new speaker series for winter, 2012, exploring “Gender in Racial Spaces: Feminist Scholarship on the History of Jim Crow.“ More information will follow as plans develop.

For more information and expressions of interest in presenting work during the 2011–12 academic year, participating in future May seminars, or developing new efforts along these lines, please contact Dr. Hannah Rosen.