Graduate Consortium of Women's Studies

News & Events

Feminisms Unbound

Graduate Student Roundtable

Wednesday, April 12, 2017: 5:30-7:30 PM
The Moore Room, Building 6 Room 321, MIT

The final event of the Feminisms Unbound 2016-2017 year will be a roundtable of current GCWS doctoral students who are participating in the GCWS Workshop for Dissertation Writers in Women's and Gender Studies. The Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality has, since its inception, facilitated the production of numerous doctoral dissertations, all concerned with the transnational structures of power and resistance shaping the contemporary world. Students will present their research as the culminating event of the series.

Roundtable discussion participants:

"From Rape Trauma Syndrome to PTSD"
Leena Akhtar, PhD Candidate, History of Science, Harvard University

"Migrant Mothers: Intersecting Burdens, Resistance and the Power of Interethnic Ties"
Channon Miller, PhD Candidate, American Studies, Boston University and
Women's and Gender Studies Predoctoral Fellow, MIT

"Senses and Sights of Dispossession: Contemporary Tales of the Black Diaspora and the Global South"
Asimina Ino Nikolopoulou, PhD Candidate, English, Northeastern University

"'One World, One Life': Modernist Fiction and the Politics of Federation"
Ryan Weberling, PhD Candidate, English, Boston University

The panel will be co-moderated.

More about the panelists:
Leena Akhtar is a graduate student in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. Her scholarly interests focus on the history of medicine and mid to late 20th century psychiatry, particularly trauma psychiatry. Her dissertation is about the impact of Second Wave feminist activism on understandings of rape survivors, and trauma survivors more broadly, in the 1970s.

Channon Miller is a PhD candidate in the American and New England Studies program from Hartford, Connecticut and an alum of Trinity College (CT). Her dissertation, "Migrant Black Mothers," draws on documentary evidence and original ethnographic research to explores the lived realities of native and foreign-born black mothers in the contemporary moment. She asserts that they forge interethnic ties as a means of challenging the intersecting oppressions of race, gender and class and its amplification in the "post-racial" context.

Asimina Ino Nikolopoulou is a Visiting Lecturer at Tufts Experimental College and a PhD Candidate in English at Northeastern University. Prior to this she completed a Masters in American Studies at Columbia University as a Fulbright Scholar. Her dissertation "Senses and Sights of Dispossession: Contemporary Tales of the Black Diaspora and the Global South," examines the affective underpinnings of citizenship and belonging in literary texts, visual art, and media representations curated by women of color.

Ryan Weberling is a doctoral candidate in the English department at Boston University, where he is also completing a graduate certificate in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. His dissertation, "'One World, One Life': Modernist Fiction and the Politics of Federation," considers how writers such as Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, and Salman Rushdie responded to the emergence of liberal federalism as a mode of governance and structure of feeling.

About Feminisms Unbound

This Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality (GCWS) initiative, Feminisms Unbound, is an annual event series featuring debates that focus on feminist concerns, theories, and practices in this contemporary moment. This series is intended to foster conversations and community among Boston-area feminist intellectuals and activists. The series, in its open configuration, endeavors to allow the greatest measure of engagement across multiple disciplinary trajectories, and a full array of feminist investments.

The event organizers, who are also visiting scholars with the GCWS this year, are Kimberly Juanita Brown, Assistant Professor of English and Africana Studies, Mount Holyoke College, Lisa Lowe, Professor of English and American Studies, Tufts University, and Jyoti Puri, Professor of Sociology, Simmons College, have programmed the four events in this series.

Feminisms Unbound 2016-2017 Events

Black Women and the Carceral State
Wednesday, September 14, 2016, 5:30-7:30 PM
Location: Building E51 Room 095, MIT

Sexual Collisions: Reflections on Empire, Terror, and Violence
Wednesday, October 26th: 5:30-7:30 PM
Location: Building E51 Room 095, MIT

Trans/Multi/Mediations
February 15, 2017: 5:30-7:30 PM
Location: The Moore Room, Building 6 Room 321, MIT Campus

Graduate Student Roundtable
Wednesday, April 12, 2017: 5:30 - 7:30 PM
Location: The Moore Room, Building 6 Room 321, MIT Campus