CSSD Director presents keynote address at Norwalk Community College
Professor Marianne Hirsch will be the keynote speaker at the 22nd annual Academic Festival hosted by Norwalk Community College.
On Wednesday, April 3, Center for the Study of Social Difference Director and William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Marianne Hirsch will give the keynote address at the 22nd annual Academic Festival at Norwalk Community College.
This year’s conference theme is Postmemory: Hidden Trauma, Healing Narratives, a topic very familiar to Professor Hirsch whose work combines feminist theory with memory studies, particularly the transmission of memories of violence across generations. Professor Hirsch’s keynote lecture, "Postmemory for the Future," will be presented at 10am in the East Campus PepsiCo Theater at Norwalk Community College.
Click here to learn more.
Marianne Hirsch is a co-director of the Women Mobilizing Memory working group, William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and a Professor in the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a former President of the Modern Language Association of America.
Frances Negrón-Muntaner presents keynote lecture at 2019 GRACE Conference
Co-director of CSSD working group delivers three presentations at the 2019 Gender and Cultures of Equality (GRACE) Conference in Holland.
On March 9th, 2019, co-director of CSSD working group Unpayable Debt: Capital, Violence, and the New Global Economy, Frances Negrón-Muntaner gave a keynote speech entitled "The Valor y Cambio" Project: Art, Narrative and Decolonial Joy” at the 2019 Gender and Cultures of Equality (GRACE) Conference in Holland. In addition to her keynote presentation, professor Negrón-Muntaner delivered two presentations at the conference, which aims to systematically investigate the cultural production of gender equalities within Europe.
Click here to view the full conference schedule.
Frances Negrón-Muntaner is a filmmaker, writer, curator, scholar and professor at Columbia University, where she is also the founding curator of the Latino Arts and Activism Archive. For more on her Valor y Cambio social currency project click here.
The GRACE Conference celebrates the achievements of the GRACE Project’s work and provides opportunities to explore the themes of the GRACE research through a range of activities, including a series of public talks by GRACE researchers and other distinguished international scholars.
CSSD Director Gives Talk at Columbia Global Center
Professor Marianne Hirsch discusses “Women Carrying Memories: Stateless Figures” in Istanbul.
On March 28th, Center for the Study of Social Difference Director and William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Marianne Hirsch addressed an audience of over 150 in Istanbul, Turkey on the subject of “Women Carrying Memory: Stateless Figures”. A co-director of the Women Mobilizing Memory working group, Professor Hirsch’s talk highlighted two recent memorial projects by feminist diasporic artists that explore the vicissitudes and vulnerabilities of exile and statelessness. The talk, which culminated in a Q&A session moderated by Ayşe Gül Altınay, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Sabancı University and Aylin Vartanyan, Lecturer at Bogazici University, was a response to the renewed monumentality of memory museums, memorials and commemorative rituals that perpetuate nationalism and ethnocentrism.
Click here to see photos from the event.
For more on Women Mobilizing Memory click here.
Farrah Jasmine Griffin featured in the Columbia Daily Spectator
Co-director of CSSD working group Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women is one of four Columbia faculty credited for the creation Columbia’s first African American and African Diaspora Studies department.
Farrah J. Griffin, co-director of CSSD working group Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women and director of CSSD affiliate Institute for Research in African-American Studies is featured in a Columbia Daily Spectator article about the recently created African American and African Diaspora Studies department.
The article highlights the decades of activism surrounding the University’s lack of dedicated scholarship to issues of race and ethnicity that led to the creation of Columbia’s first African American and African Diaspora Studies department last fall.
The article details the efforts of Griffin and three other faculty, as well as a myriad of other students and scholars, whose efforts were instrumental in pushing for change in the slow-moving world of academia.
Columbia’s Board of Trustees voted unanimously to create the new department of African American and African Diaspora Studies on Dec. 1, 2018 with Farrah J. Griffin as its first chair.
Click here to read the article.
For more on Farrah J. Griffin’s contributions to CSSD see the Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women webpage for past events, the CSSD blog for news and publications and check out our YouTube channel for how CSSD is Imagining Justice and Creating Change as well as for full-length videos from our 10th Anniversary Symposium.
Women and Migration: Responses in Art and History published on IWD
Book featuring contributions from several members of CSSD working groups published by Open Book Publishers
On International Women’s Day, Women and Migration: Responses in Art and History, a book featuring the works of several members of CSSD working groups was published by Open Book Publishers. Our working group members featured in the book are Lorie Novak, Jennifer L. Morgan, Kellie Jones, Marianne Hirsch, Gayatri Gopinath, and Deborah Willis.
The book is comprised of series of essays that chart how women’s profound and turbulent experiences of migration have been articulated in writing, photography, art and film. As a whole, the volume gives an impression of a wide range of migratory events from women’s perspectives, covering the Caribbean Diaspora, refugees and slavery through the various lenses of politics and war, love and family.
The contributors, which include academics and artists, offer both personal and critical points of view on the artistic and historical repositories of these experiences. Selfies, motherhood, violence and Hollywood all feature in this substantial treasure-trove of women’s joy and suffering, disaster and delight, place, memory and identity.
Click here to purchase, read or download.
Frances Negron-Muntaner’s Community Currency Project featured in The Manhattan Times
The co-director of the CSSD working group Unpayable Debt has launched a project to acknowledge unrecognized and unpaid services in Puerto Rico communities.
Frances Negron-Muntaner, co-director of the CSSD working group Unpayable Debt and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia, along with artist Sarabel Santos Negron, has implemented a community currency program in towns across Puerto Rico. The project, named Valor y Cambio, is part of an initiative to recognize work and services that go unacknowledged or unpaid. Individuals can get bills or pesos from ATM machines by telling a story, and these bills can in turn be used to pay for goods at participating businesses.
The bills, which come in seven denominations, feature important Puerto Rican historical figures. As the educational system in Puerto Rico does not prominently feature its own history as part of the curriculum, the initiative is also attempting to connect people to the past. The full feature on the project can be read here in The Manhattan TImes.