Ranjana Khanna

Neferti Tadiar

Wendy Brown

Tani Barlow

Drucilla Cornell

READINGS
KEYNOTE LECTURES, SEMINAR LEADERS/ROUNDTABLE PARTICIPANTS
SCHEDULE
LOGISTICS
SPONSORS

A two day event featuring keynote lectures and working seminars

As an interdisciplinary field, Women's Studies has long been in critical conversation with a variety of disciplines, such that its languages of analysis, methodological priorities, and histories of research and writing are often recognizably situated in relation to the disciplinary identities of its practitioners. In recent years however, with the international growth of PhD programs, there has been much discussion and speculation about the extent to which Women's Studies has (or should have) its own post-disciplinary or transdisciplinary mode of inquiry. Posed as a question, the field asks itself: does Women's Studies have a distinctive tradition of inquiry of its own? The answer of course is nothing if not debatable, but the chief candidate for affirmation is the seemingly amorphormous entity, feminist theory . It is typically the name of the one course that students in every undergraduate and graduate curriculum are required to take, and it serves as an acknowledged critical domain for debates that cross both disciplinary and national lines.

We call our planned event for March 2009 a workshop to foreground our interest in feminist theory as a scholarly domain of inquiry. Therefore, in keeping with the interdisciplinary impulse central to Women's Studies as a field, we will resist consolidating feminist theory into a canon of great works or privileged authors, or prioritizing it as a specific kind of methodological project. The Workshop will be organized pedagogically to promote intense study, featuring both keynote lectures by internationally known scholars and small working seminars for participants.

READINGS Those registrants participating in Seminars are asked to read the following articles recommended by our Keynote Speakers.

Tani Barlow:
What is a Poem?  The Event of Women and the Modern Girl as Problems in Global or World History (forthcoming in World Scale Ambitions, eds. Nirvana Tanoukhi and David Palumbo-Liu, Duke University Press)

Wendy Brown:
Just Marriage, ed. Mary Lyndon Shanley (OUP:2004) pp. 87-92
Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire, Wendy Brown (PUP:2006) pp.176-205

Drucilla Cornell:
Variegated Visions of Humanity: The ambiguous legacy of the peoples law
The Philosophical Basis of Pluralism (Inaugural Address)

Neferti Tadiar:
Poetics of Filipina Export, Neferti Tadiar (forthcoming)
'We Want Them Alive!': The Politics and Culture of Human Rights by Rosa Linda Fregoso in Social Identies (12:2, March 2006)

KEYNOTE LECTURES, SEMINAR LEADERS AND ROUNDTABLE PARTICIPANTS:

**Books by keynotes, seminar leaders and roundtable participants will be available for sale during the Workshop.

Nancy Armstrong (moderator) is professor of English at Duke University. She is the author of four major books and more than 100 articles on feminist theory, 18th- and 19th-century British literature and culture, visual culture, and critical theory including Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism (2002) and How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from 1719-1900 (2005). She is managing editor of the journal, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, co-editor of Encyclopedia of British Literary History and co-editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature (2006). Armstrong is currently working on a project provisionally titled Gothic Remains.

Tani Barlow (keynote and seminar leader) is the T. T. and W. F. Chao Professor of Asian History and Director of the T.T. and W.F. Chao Center for Asian Studies at Rice University. A leading scholar of modern Chinese history and a critical theorist, Barlow taught at the University of Washington, where she was a professor of history and women's studies. She served for several years as that university's director of the Project for Critical Asian Studies. Barlow is the founding senior editor of positions: east asia cultures critique, one of the world's leading interdisciplinary journals on Asia. The publication received the prestigious 2005 Best New Journal Award by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals of the Modern Language Association. Barlow is the author of The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism (2004); New Asian Marxisms (2002); Cinema and Desire: Feminist Marxism and Cultural Politics in the Work of Dai Jinhua (co-author, 2002).

Jennifer Devere Brody (roundtable) is professor of African and African American Studies at Duke University where she teaches cultural and performance studies, gender and sexuality as well as film and literary studies. She is the author of Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity and Victorian Culture (1998) and Punctuation: Art, Politics and Play (2008). She has held a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Ford Foundation and her research has been supported by the Monette/Horwitz Trust for Independent Research as well as the British Society for Theatre Research. Her work on race, visual culture and African American Literature has appeared in journals such as Genders, Signs, Callaloo, Theatre Journal, Text and Performance Quarterly and numerous edited volumes. Before joining the faculty at Duke, Brody was the Weinberg College Board of Visitors Research and Teaching Professor at Northwestern University. She was also the President of the Women and Theatre Program, a division of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education.

Wendy Brown (keynote and seminar leader) is professor of Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley. She has made major contributions to post- Foucaultian political theory and feminist theory. Brown's books include Manhood and Politics: A Feminist Reading in Political Theory (1988), States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (1995), Politics Out of History (2001), Left Legalism/Left Critique , co-edited with Janet Halley (2002), Edgework: Critical Essays in Knowledge and Politics (2005), and Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (2006). She has lectured widely in Europe and North America, has held a number of distinguished visiting lectureships, and has recently been a Senior Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and a UC Berkeley Humanities Fellow.

Tina M. Campt (moderator) is associate professor of Women's Studies and History at Duke University. An interdisciplinary scholar by necessity and choice, her work theorizes gender, memory and racial formation among African Diasporic communities in Europe, and Germany in particular. In addition to articles in New German Critique, Radical History Review, Meridians and Callaloo, she is the author of Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich (2004), and Der Black Atlantik (2004), co-edited with Paul Gilroy. Her most recent publications include "Family Matters: Diaspora, Difference, and the Visual Archive" (Social Text 98) and "Reconstructing Womanhood: A Future Beyond Empire" (with Saidiya Hartman in small axe 13: 1/28). Her current project, Image Matters: Archive, Photography and the African Diaspora in Europe, engages family photography as a crucial site of cultural formation and articulation for two Black European communities: Black Britons and Black Germans.

Drucilla Cornell (keynote and seminar leader) is professor of Political Science, Women's Studies, and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. Prior to her academic career, Cornell was a union organizer for the UAW, the UE, and the IUE in California, New Jersey, and New York. Her books include Beyond Accomodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction and the Law (1991, new edition 1999), Transformations: Recollective Imagination and Sexual Difference (1993), The Imaginary Domain: Abortion, Pornography, and Sexual Harrassment (1995) At the Heart of Freedom: Feminism, Sex, and Equality (1998), Just Cause: Freedom, Identity, and Rights (2000), Between Women and Generations: Legacies of Dignity (2002). A produced playwright, productions of her plays The Dream Cure, Background Interference, and Lifeline have been performed in California, New York, Florida, and Ohio. She is currently working on two books: one about the future of freedom, equality, and global development; another about the future of critical theory.

Ranjana Khanna (seminar leader) is the Margaret Taylor Smith Director of Women's Studies and professor of English, Literature and Women's Studies at Duke University. Her research interests include Anglo- and Francophone Postcolonial theory and literature, psychoanalysis, and feminist theory. She has published numerous articles on transnational feminism, psychoanalysis, autobiography, postcolonial agency, multiculturalism in an international context, postcolonial Joyce, area studies and women's studies, and Algerian film. She is the author of Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (2003) and Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation 1830 to the Present (2008). her current book projects in progress are "Asylum: The Concept and the Practice" and "Technologies of the Unbelonging."

Jolie Olcott (roundtable) is associate professor in the History Department at Duke University. Her research interests are on feminist history of modern Mexico. Her first book, Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico (2005), explores questions of gender and citizenship in the 1930s. She is currently working on two book-length projects: a history of the 1975 UN International Women's Year Conference in Mexico City (under contract with Oxford University Press), and a biography of the activist and folksinger Concha Michel. She is also developing a long-term project on the labor, political, and conceptual history of motherhood in twentieth-century Mexico.

Carlos Rojas (moderator) is assistant professor of Modern Chinese Cultural Studies in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. He is the author of The Great Wall: A Cultural History [under contract]; The Naked Gaze: Reflections on Chinese Modernity (2008); and Diagnosing the Chinese Body Politic (expected completion: 2009). His research interest include modern Chinese literature, film, and cultural studies, with particular interests in gender and visual culture; corporal studies; and Sinophone culture and diaspora studies.

Neferti Tadiar (keynote and seminar leader) is professor of Women's Studies at Barnard College. Her academic interests include transnational and third world feminisms; postcolonial theory; critical theories of race and subjectivity; literary and social theory; cultural studies of the Asia Pacific region; and Philippine studies. Her work concerns the role of cultural practice and social imagination in the production of wealth, power, marginality and liberatory movements in the context of global relations. She is currently working on a book-project entitled: Discourse on Empire: Living Under the Rule of Permanent War and beginning a new research project entitled "Schooling National Subjects: Experience and Education in US Colonial Philippines". Her books include Things Fall Away: Philippine Literatures, Historical Experience and Tangential Makings of Globality (forthcoming), Beyond the Frame: Women of Color and Visual Representation, co-edited with Angela Y. Davis (2005), Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (2004); Winner of the Philippine National Book Award (2005).

Ara Wilson (seminar leader) is associate professor of Women's Studies and Cultural Anthropology and Director of the program in the study of sexualities at Duke University. Her research interests include gender and sexuality in global modernity, transnational feminists, uban Southeast Asia and the cultural logics of global capital. Her book The Intimate Economies of Bangkok: Tomboys, Tycoons, and Avon Labies in The Global City was published in 2004. Her research combines attention to political economy, critical studies of culture, and post-colonial critiques of Eurocentrism. She is currently engaged in two ongoing research projects, the first one on medical tourism to Thailand and Singapore. The second, part of a book project in progress provisionally entitled "Sexual Latitudes." is based on her engagement with such international processes as the 1995 Beijing UN Conference on Women and the World Social Forum.

Robyn Wiegman (roundtable chair) is professor of Women's Studies and Literature at Duke University. She is currently a co-convenor of the Franklin Humanities Institute seminar, entitled Alternative Political Imaginaries, with Michael Hardt. Her book projects, "Being in Time with Feminism," and Object Lessons: Readings in US Identity Knowledges, (forthcoming, Duke) are part of a longstanding research trajectory on feminism, gender, sexuality, and critical race studies. This trajectory has included the publication of her first book, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (1995) as well as numerous articles and edited collections on feminist epistemologies and pedagogies in US academic discourses, HIV and nationalism, and the futures of women's and American studies in higher education.

SCHEDULE
Friday, March 20, 2009

REGISTRATION WILL BEGIN AT 1:00 PM AT THE SANFORD INSTITUTE

2:00 pm .......... Ranjana Khanna, Opening Remarks

2:45 ................ Nerferti Tadiar, Keynote: The Human Question - Moderator, Tina Campt

4:15 ................ Break

4:30 ................ Seminar

6:00 ................ Dinner Buffet - Sanford Commons

7:30 ................ Wendy Brown, Keynote: Whose Secularism? Whose Equality? For a Return to the Critique of the Family - Moderator, Kathi Weeks

Saturday, March 21, 2009

10:00 am ........ Tani Barlow, Keynote: Wang Guangmei, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and the Event of Women - Moderator, Carlos Rojas

11:30 .............. Seminar

12:45 pm ........ Lunch - Sanford Commons

2:00 ................ Drucilla Cornell, Keynote: Rethinking Ethical Feminism Through Ubuntu - Moderator, Nancy Armstrong

3:30 ................ Break

3:45 ................ Closing Roundtable (Jennifer Devere Brody, Jocelyn Olcott, and Robyn Wiegman)

5:30................. Workshop Ends

LOGISTICS:

Duke University Interactive Map

West Campus Map and Location of the Sanford Institute (printable)

A peek inside the Sanford Institute

Terry Sanford Institute Interactive Map

Terry Sanford Institute Directions and Parking (Please note that on Saturday a parking monitor will be available to provide access in the Public Policy Lot until 11:00 am)

Additional University Parking Information (all lots will be open on Saturday)

If you are traveling from East Campus on Friday you can take Bus C-3 and get off at the 2nd stop on Towerview before the turn onto Science Drive. The schedule and a map of the route are available here.

Local Hotels (pdf)

Local Restaurants (Word)

Many thanks to our sponsors including the following Duke University Departments: Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, the Asian/Pacific Studies Institute, the Duke Law School, the Duke University Arts & Sciences Committee on Faculty Research, the History Department, the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, the Literature Program

Institutional Co-Sponsors: Women's Studies, Emory University; Department of Gender and Women's Studies, University of California at Berkeley; Women's Studies Program, Miami University of Ohio; Yale University Program in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies