Please join us for GWS Awards Day, which will take place via Zoom on Thursday, April 28 at 1:00pm.

Tune in to celebrate our students and their achievements this year!

Zoom link: https://uky.zoom.us/j/81973238446?pwd=S0RUZDQvYWFNemNFdUZ3YVNDbTZXUT09
Passcode:  300430

Please register for the conference at:  https://uky.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0kd-2oqjwrHNK456UpiyUVBxjL_0IVpm…;

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing the links to join the conference. 

27th Annual Black Women’s Conference:
Appalachian Mountains, Digital Valleys, and Everything in Between: Black Feminist Subjectivities
April 15, 2022

10-10:15 AM:  Welcome
Anastasia C. Curwood, Director, CIBS and AAAS

10:15-11:45AM:  Covid, Clapbacks, and Curation:  Blackness in the Digital Era
Kim Gallon, Purdue University,
Regina Hamilton, UK,
Kishonna Gray, UK
Moderated by TBD

12:30-1:45PM: Appalachia Ain’t White: Locating Black Feminists in the Region
Jillean McCommons, University of Virginia
Enkeshi El-Amin, University of Tennessee, Knoxville 
Moderated by Kishonna Gray, UK

2:00-3:15PM Reading Buy Black: An Author and Critics Conversation
LaKisha Simmons, University of Michigan
Oneka LaBennett, University of Southern California
Aria Halliday, UK
Moderated by DaMaris Hill, UK

3:30-4:30PM:  Keynote: Nazera Wright:  Digital Gi(rl)s: Mapping Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century
Moderated by Aria Halliday, UK

4:30-4:45PM:  Wrap Up
Gallery

Friday, April 8th

Dr. Greta LaFLeur, Associate Professor of American Studies, Yale University

11 am, Gaines Center for the Humanities, Bingham-Davis House

Work-in-Progress Discussion with Dr. LaFleur: “Trans Feminine Histories, Piece By Piece” 

All are welcome! Download a copy of the essay to be discussed here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/10-t89dqjpHiyiZxmcsPSoDHdz2Ccpzwn/view?…;

2pm, The Cornerstone - UKFCU Esports Theater

Keynote Address: "Sexual Violence and the State: A Racial History of Legal Castration"

CO-SPONSORS: English Department, Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, Early American Literature

Greta LaFleur is Associate Professor of American Studies at Yale University. Her research and teaching focus on early North American literary and cultural studies, the history of science, the history of race, the history and historiography of sexuality, and queer & trans studies. Her first book, The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), reveals how eighteenth-century race science contributed to emerging sciences of sex in the colonial Atlantic world. Other publications include Trans Historical: Gender Plurality Before the Modern (Cornell UP, 2021) and an award-winning special issue of American Quarterly, “Origins of Biopolitics in the Americas.” Dr. LaFleur is currently at work on a new project, tentatively titled A Queer History of Sexual Violence (under contract with The University of Chicago Press), which examines the role of cultural and legal responses to sexual violence in the development of modern understandings of sexuality. Her works-in-progress discussion will be drawn from this project.

Friday, April 8th

Dr. Greta LaFLeur, Associate Professor of American Studies, Yale University

11 am, Gaines Center for the Humanities, Bingham-Davis House

Work-in-Progress Discussion with Dr. LaFleur: “Trans Feminine Histories, Piece By Piece” 

All are welcome! Download a copy of the essay to be discussed here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/10-t89dqjpHiyiZxmcsPSoDHdz2Ccpzwn/view?…;

2pm, The Cornerstone - UKFCU Esports Theater

Keynote Address: "Sexual Violence and the State: A Racial History of Legal Castration"

CO-SPONSORS: English Department, Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, Early American Literature

Greta LaFleur is Associate Professor of American Studies at Yale University. Her research and teaching focus on early North American literary and cultural studies, the history of science, the history of race, the history and historiography of sexuality, and queer & trans studies. Her first book, The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), reveals how eighteenth-century race science contributed to emerging sciences of sex in the colonial Atlantic world. Other publications include Trans Historical: Gender Plurality Before the Modern (Cornell UP, 2021) and an award-winning special issue of American Quarterly, “Origins of Biopolitics in the Americas.” Dr. LaFleur is currently at work on a new project, tentatively titled A Queer History of Sexual Violence (under contract with The University of Chicago Press), which examines the role of cultural and legal responses to sexual violence in the development of modern understandings of sexuality. Her works-in-progress discussion will be drawn from this project.

The Lewis Honors College’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council proudly hosts The Interviewer Asks: A Docupoetry Reading with Teja Sudhakar on Tuesday, April 12^th at 4:00pm either in the Lewis Hall Scholar’s Lounge or on Zoom. This event is hybrid. In-person attendees will enjoy light refreshments from Martine’s Pastries, a local immigrant women-owned business. Zoom attendees may register here to attend remotely: https://uky.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0sfuyurDkqG9AErQc97AeU4ErWxEZWLBEO  

Teja Sudhakar’s original, interdisciplinary work merges oral history and poetry and explores how immigrant women in Lexington, Kentucky conceptualize and navigate borders, homes, places, and spaces. Teja’s docupoetry amplifies women’s voices and interprets their stories gathered through her collaborative oral history project with diverse immigrant women in our community. Docupoetry, a tradition of expressing investigative research through lyrical acts, is driven by the researcher’s own positionality and process of learning alongside their data. Teja’s own negotiations of identity as a first-generation immigrant woman of color imbue the recorded stories exchanged with her narrators, women tracing their origins to Mexico, Pakistan, Canada, Syria, and France. Her poetry provides a beautiful and moving window into how women weave together memory, identity, and place. Please join us for the first public reading from Teja’s poetry chapbook Looking for Smoke. 

Teja is a double-major in Gender and Women's Studies and Psychology, with a minor is creative writing. She immigrated to the United States from Tamil Nadu, India when she was 5 years old. Sudhakar has received some of the University of Kentucky's highest honors, including the Singletary Scholarship, the Gaines Center for the Humanities Fellowship, and admission into the Lewis Honors College, where in 2019 she founded The Work in Progress Society--the only student-led writing workshop housed at LHC. She would go on to direct the group for the next three years. While at Gaines and Lewis, Sudhakar would also complete apprenticeships under Dr. Rebecca Gayle Howell and Dr. Zada Komara, and in 2021, she collaborated with Howell to co-moderate the Lewis Honors College keynote by the Kingsley Tufts Awarded poet, Ross Gay. Sudhakar's first language is Telugu, her second language is Tamil, and her third is English. She writes in English. Her first chapbook, hold fire (2020), a collection of poems that combines the confessional mode with feminist Hindu myth revision, received U.K.'s top prize for undergraduate creative research, The Oswald Award. Her second chapbook, Looking for Smoke (2022), presents a sequence of docu-poems that explore Kentucky women's immigration narratives, including the poet's own. In recent weeks, Sudhakar has received admission into several top ranked M.F.A. programs in the U.S., one of which she will attend upon graduation. 

Dr. Whitehead’s talk will emphasize the significance of centering Black communities and perspectives about whiteness and whitesupremacy in anti-racist work and scholarship. In this talk, he will explore the following questions:

• What is the relationship between whiteness and anti-blackness?Why does this relationship matter?
• What does it mean to center Black communities in how we eventhink about whiteness?
• What does it mean to center Black communities in how we thinkabout the purpose and usefulness of anti-racist work?

Throughout the talk, Dr. Whitehead will draw upon examples from his research on white undergraduate college students and discuss implications for practice.

Dr. Melvin A. Whitehead is an assistant professor of student affairs administration at Binghamton University. His research explores the legacies of racism on U.S. college campuses,with a focus on white college students’ dis/connections with whiteness and anti-blackness. Dr.Whitehead’s work draws upon critical theories and frameworks and centers ways of knowing within Black communities, trauma, healing, and the spirit to complicate the field’s understanding of whiteness on U.S. college campuses.

Register at: https://uky.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_oluXSG6VT9aRq448qAw2eQ

Registration Link:

 
 https://uky.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0ocOCqrDwoE9Yni4KsvYjf2jvNdXovoC1A

Join the Cooperative for the Humanities and Social Sciences (CHSS) for a

conversation between Lee Mandelo, author of the "queer southern gothic"

Summer Sons, and Ashley Blooms, author of recently-published Appalachian novel

Where I Can't Follow, about their work as Kentucky writers. Blooms and Mandelo

will discuss their journeys through publishing, how they approach Appalachian

cultures in their fiction, and how their novels engage with topics such as gender

and trauma within these contexts