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Women's and Gender History symposium to focus this year on 'mobility'
Andrea
Lynn, Humanities Editor
217-333-2177; andreal@uiuc.edu
2/23/2006
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. —
The seventh annual Graduate Symposium on Women’s and Gender History will take
place March 9-11 (Thursday to Saturday) at the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign.
Most sessions of the event, which is free and open to the public, will
be in the Illini Union, 1401 W. Green St., Urbana. The symposium, sponsored
by Illinois’ history department, constitutes one of the campus’s major events in recognition
of national Women’s History Month, held each March.
Scholars from 28 institutions will present papers on the theme of mobility.
According to the symposium’s executive committee, the event is
the only
history symposium organized by graduate students that is dedicated solely
to women’s and gender history. Adding to the luster of the event
are its ties to the Journal of Women’s History, which is based
at Illinois.
Jennifer Morgan, a professor of history and women’s and gender
studies at Rutgers University, will give the keynote talk on “Accounting
for Women in Slavery: Demography and Epistemology in Early African American
History” at 7:30 p.m. March 9 in Room 170.
A lunch seminar at noon on March 10 in Room 406 will feature Afsaneh
Najmabadi, professor of history and of women’s studies at Harvard
University; her topic is “Sexing Gender, Transing Homos: Travail
of Sexuality in Contemporary Iran.”
At 3 p.m. on March 11 in Room 405, the editorial team of the Journal
of Women’s History will conduct a roundtable discussion on “Demystifying
the Journal Article.” Editors are Jean Allman, history and African
studies; Marilyn Booth, comparative and world literature; Antoinette
Burton, chair of the history department; Jennifer Edwards, history graduate
student; and Rebecca McNulty Schreiber, history graduate student.
The Graduate Symposium on Women’s and Gender History began in
2000 as the capstone event of the history department’s Women’s
History Month observance. Since its inaugural year, the symposium has
expanded beyond the campus to include graduate students from the United
States and Canada from academic programs including American studies,
anthropology, art history, classics, comparative literature, English,
history, the Institute of Communications Research, library and information
science, sociology and women’s studies.
The symposium also has strengthened its original mission by encouraging
historical analysis of intersections of gender with race, class, ethnicity
and sexuality.
Many U. of I. units are co-sponsoring the event, including the Center
for Advanced Study, the History
Graduate Students Association and the Spurlock
Museum.
