Emily Burrill is Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies and Director of the African Studies Center at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.  She is the author of States of Marriage: Gender, Justice, and Rights in Colonial Mali.  She is co-editor of Domestic Violence and the Law in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa.  Dr. Burrill’s research focuses on the history of marriage and marriage-related practices, and women and citizenship rights in post-colonial Africa.

Anastasia Curwood is Assistant Professor of History and African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky.  She was a Visiting Fellow at the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference, Emory University, from 2012-2014.  She is the author of Stormy Weather: Middle-Class African American Marriages Between the Two World Wars.

Srimati Basu is Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Kentucky.  She is also a member of the Committee on Social Theory and the Asia Center Affiliates.  Her latest book is The Trouble with Marriage: Feminists Confront Law and Violence in India.

This panel will present research on the institution of marriage in transnational contexts and the sites of legal and domestic violence within marriage.

Reception to follow in the Alumni Gallery.

Sponsored by the Dept. of Gender & Women's studies and the Gaines Center for the Humanities. 

Susan Bordo is Professor of Gender and Women's Studies and holds the Otis A. Singletary Chair in the Humanities at the University of Kentucky. She is internationally known for her many publications in body studies and history of culture. Her most recent book, The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England’s Most Notorious Queen, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in April 2013.

Ellen Rosenman is Professor of English at the University of Kentucky. She is the co-editor of Other Mothers: Beyond the Victorian Maternal Ideal and author of Unauthorized Pleasures: Accounts of Victorian Erotic Experience.  Dr. Rosenman is interested in the novel and its relationship to other kinds of narratives such as journalism, professional discourses, and conduct books as ways in which cultural values are articulated, challenged, and re-made.

Cristina Alcalde is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Kentucky.  She is also Director of Graduate Studies for Gender and Women's Studies and from 2011-2015 served as Faculty Co-Director of A&S Wired Residential College.  Her 2010 book, The Woman in the Violence: Gender, Poverty, and Resistance in Peru, was recently translated into a Spanish edition.

The editors and authors from the book will discuss how interdisciplinary and intersectional analysis foregrounds feminist inquiry into social movements and political discourses as they migrate from the local to the global and back again.

Please join us for a reception following the panel discussion in the Alumni Gallery. 

Sponsored by the Dept. of Gender & Women's studies and the Gaines Center for the Humanities. 

Dr. Renzetti is Chair and Professor of Sociology at the University of Kentucky, and currently serves as the Judi Conway Patton Endowed Chair in the Center for Research on Violence Against Women.  She is also the editor of Violence Against Women: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal, the Oxford University Press Series on Interpersonal Violence, and the University of California Press Series on Gender and Justice.

Dr. Follingstad is the Women’s Circle Endowed Chair in the Center for Research on Violence Against Women and a Professor of Clinical and Forensic Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry, College of Medicine at the University of Kentucky (with a joint appointment in the Department of Psychology).  She is currently the Executive Director of the Center for Research on Violence Against Women at the University of Kentucky.

Dr. Renzetti and Dr. Follingstad will present findings from the latest Campus Attitudes Toward Safety (CATS) study and discuss what can be learned from the study and the importance of improving safety on campus for all students.

A reception will follow in the Alumni Gallery adjacent to the auditorium. 

A  film screening of the documentary "Let the Fire Burn" and a poster session analyzing the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement. The film will be screened at 6 p.m. Monday, Nov. 16, at Young Library. The poster session will be held in the adjacent Alumni Gallery and will feature poster presentations of research on recent killings of unarmed black people in the United States by students currently enrolled in Stein’s "GWS 595 - Crime & Punishment: Race & Ferguson in Historical Context."

Sponsored by:  The Department of Gender & Women's Studies, African American & Africana Studies Program, and the MLK Center. 

The University of Kentucky's Gaines Center for the Humanities and the Department of Gender and Women's Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences are teaming up with the Office of LGBTQ* Resources, the Martin Luther King Center, the African American and Africana Studies Program and Black Student Union to present three events exploring violence against members of the LGBTQ* and Black communities as part of a series of workshops on violence and the human condition. 

Upcoming Nov 16 and Nov 18 Events:



Fittingly with the U.S. Supreme Court simultaneously deciding to uphold the right for same-sex marriage and to retract important aspects of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the second part of the series is "Policing Black Bodies." This panel discussion will be at 2 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 18, at Young Library Auditorium. The three scholars featured in this event will provide critical commentary, transnational connections and historical contexts for current struggles with violence against African and African-American communities. A Q&A session will be held at the end of this event, followed by a reception.

Melynda J. Price, director of the African American and Africana Studies Program and the Robert E. Harding Jr. Professor of Law at UK, will open the panel for "Policing Black Bodies." She is the author of "At the Cross: Race, Religion and Citizenship in the Politics of the Death Penalty."

The second speaker of the session will be Melissa Stein, assistant professor of gender and women’s studies at UK and author of "Measuring Manhood: Race and the Science of Masculinity, 1830-1934," newly published this fall.

Kevin Mumford, professor of history at University of Illinois and author of numerous books on Black history, including "Newark: A History of Race, Rights, and Riots in America," rounds out the panel.

A special ancillary event, a film screening of the documentary "Let the Fire Burn" and a poster session analyzing the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement, will be held in the days leading up to the second panel discussion. The film will be screened at 6 p.m. Monday, Nov. 16, at Young Library Auditorium. The poster session will be held in the adjacent Alumni Gallery and will feature poster presentations of research on recent killings of unarmed black people in the United States by students currently enrolled in Stein’s "GWS 595 - Crime & Punishment: Race & Ferguson in Historical Context."

Carol Mason, department chair of Gender & Women's Studies, radiates enthusiasm about the student engagement in this series. "I am so grateful for Dr. Stein for her innovative pedagogy and very excited to see the posters that students have created in her class on 'Crime and Punishment.' This is the kind of real-world application of interdisciplinary scholarship that makes gender and women’s studies such a transformative experience for students."

The College of Arts and Sciences and the Gaines Center are sponsoring a year of programming around the broad theme of "Violence and the Human Condition." Over the course of the 2015-16 academic year, faculty members from many different UK departments will collaborate with each other and with visiting experts from other universities in a series of mini-conferences and workshops that will be free and open to the campus as a whole.

The partnership will explore the theme of violence across many different registers — architecture and conflict, political violence, war and gender, transnational dimensions of violence, the intersections of violence in Latin America, and the notion of war without end as a metaphor in contemporary life.

Roxane Gay’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, West Branch, Virginia Quarterly Review, NOON, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Time, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The Rumpus, Salon, and many others. She is the co-editor of PANK. She is also the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, Bad Feminist, and Hunger, forthcoming from Harper in 2016.

This reading is co-sponsored by African American and Africana Studies Program and Department of Gender and Women's Studies.