Gender, Race, and History, a program at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, seeks to promote interdisciplinary explorations of gender, race, and their historical nexus. It aims to foster new analyses of the history of the production of racial and ethnic difference, of the impact of such differences on gender identities and experiences, and of the constitutive role of race, as well as sexuality, class, and nation, on the formation, contestation, and transformation of gender itself. Its focus will be scholarship in the humanities that emphasizes historical perspectives and experiments with different approaches to "intersectionality" (i.e., theoretical frameworks for understanding the interlocking and mutually constitutive nature of various categories of identity and power). In 2009-2010, the geographic focus will be the United States, including both national and local histories within the United States and transnational connections between the United States and other parts of the world. In its initial stages this program will include a speaker series and study groups for graduate students and faculty at the University of Michigan. In subsequent years, it will develop projects that facilitate undergraduate engagement with historical and theoretical explorations of the intersection of gender and race. The program will also pursue funding to host a major conference on feminist scholarship on race.
Speaker Series:
Speakers will be invited to share their work on three overlapping themes:
Gender, Sexuality, and Racial Formation
The series will bring to campus scholars working on the ways that gender and sexuality have shaped and have been shaped by various formations of race and racism emerging out of different histories of slavery, emancipation, and migration in the United States.
Gender, Race, and Space: Segregation in Comparative Perspective
The series will also invite scholars whose work will help us to understand the history of racial segregation in the United States, its multiple gendered and sexual dimensions, and its convergences and divergences with forms of racism and patterns of racial discrimination that developed in other parts of the Americas.
Intersection: History and Theory
The speaker series will also promote discussion of the disparate ways historians have drawn on theory and theorists have drawn on history to conceptualize the nexus of gender and race. To this end, invited speakers will be asked to comment on how historical methods and feminist theory have been joined in and have informed their work
Study Group:
The Program will also sponsor a new study group that will bring together faculty and graduate students interested in particular topical areas within the study of the history of race and gender. The study group will provide a space for faculty and graduate students to read each other’s work in progress as well as key new texts in the field and to build conversations in and across the humanities, social sciences, and the professional schools on feminist thinking about race. During the Fall term of 2009, the study group will focus on new developments in interdisciplinary scholarship on the intersection of race and gender. We will also read works by scholars participating in the speaker series in preparation for their visits and for thinking through the joining of historical and theoretical approaches to studying intersectionality. (Possible collaborations for the Fall term are in the works with the Law and Slavery and Freedom Project and the Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women Project.) During the Winter term, the study group will focus on histories of race and sexual violence, building on the growth of interest in this topic among graduate students in Women’s Studies and American Culture as well as various disciplines and professional schools. The Program Director is currently attempting to organize a colloquium of graduate student work in this area, for which one of the scholars invited for the speaker series will serve as a discussant in conjunction with her lecture.
This program is directed by Hannah Rosen, Assistant Research Scientist, Institute for Research on Women and Gender. For more information, please contact her at(hrosen@umich.edu).