The Gender and History Lecture Series Presents:

Maylei Blackwell, University of Los Angeles
Associate Professor César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o Studies and Women’s Studies Department

Tues, Sept 23, 2014 – 4:30-6pm, reception to follow
Konover Auditorium, Dodd Research Center
Storrs Campus

This event is free and open to the public.

Professor Maylei Blackwell is an interdisciplinary scholar activist, oral historian, and author of ¡Chicana Power! Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement, published with University of Texas Press.

She is an Associate Professor in the César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o Studies and Women’s Studies Department, and affiliated faculty in the American Indian Studies and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies.

 

Her research has two distinct, but interrelated trajectories that broadly analyze how women’s social movements in the U.S. and Mexico are shaped by questions of difference ­ factors such as race, indigeneity, class, sexuality or citizenship status ­ and how these differences impact the possibilities and challenges of transnational organizing. Through collaborative and community-based research, Professor Blackwell has excavated genealogies of women of color feminism in the U.S. and accompanied indigenous women organizers in Mexico as well as feminist movements and sexual rights activists throughout Latin American. Her most recent research with farm worker women and indigenous migrants seeks to better understand new forms of grassroots transnationalism

“American Lives and American Studies”

Thursday, October 9, 2014 and Friday, October 10, 2014

 

What American lives can be made with an education in the various fields encompassed by American Studies?

At a time when every aspect of higher education is being questioned and the value of humanities degrees doubted, the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Conference in Early American Studies takes a wide-ranging look at the diverse ways in which the study of American history and culture, past and present, has shaped lives and careers since the mid-1970s.

The conference brings together former students and advisees of Draper chair Robert A. Gross to reflect on the opportunities, experiences, and professions opened up by their undergraduate and graduate educations in such areas as American history, literature, art, music, popular culture, government, and sociology and in the interdisciplinary field of American Studies. Graduates of Amherst College, the College of William and Mary, and the University of Connecticut, among other schools, the participants are now active in the law, government, philanthropy, business, education, and the arts. Like the figures celebrated in Emma Willard’s “Temple of Time” (1846), they, too, are making a mark on America’s unfolding history.

Their impact extends from the entertainment industry to environmental policy, from journalism to public service, from teaching schoolchildren to pursuing social justice. How have their post-graduate commitments and values been shaped by their formal education? In what ways did that education prepare them, if at all, for the challenges they have faced? And what critical lessons do they derive from experience for how American Studies should be taught today? Taking place during Professor Gross’s final semester of teaching at UConn, this fourth Draper Conference takes a wide view of higher education, as it affects the ways we live as citizens of the United States and of a transnational world. We welcome you to join in the conversation.

Questions? Contact Robert.Gross@uconn.edu

Please join us for the 8th Annual History Graduate Student Research Conference!

SESSION A, 1:15-3:00 pm

Panel One, SHAPING POLICY
Class of 1947 Room, Babbidge Library
Chair, Brittney L. Yancy

Nathan Braccio, Enslaving the Heathen, Enslaving the Christian: The Connections between American Indian and African Slavery in Seventeenth-Century New England

Margaret Stack, The Search for an Appropriate Navy: Matthew Fontaine Maury’s Negotiation of Nationalism and Sectionalism in Naval Reform

Gabrielle Westcott, The Other Struggle for Hearts and Minds: Clark Clifford, Lyndon Johnson, and the Emotional Influences on Vietnam Policy in 1968

Commentator, Michael Limberg

 

Panel Two, NARRATING CULTURE
Babbidge Library Lecture Center—Level 2
Chair, Jeffery R. Egan

Anna Leigh Todd, “A Second Offense of This Kind”: Female Sexual Repeat Offenders in Colonial New England

Mary Sherman Lycan, Earning Her Keep: A Connecticut Girl’s Home Textile Labor, 1802-1812

Danielle Dumaine, Life by a Different Beat: The Journals of Diane di Prima, 1966-1967, and Negotiating Motherhood, Radicalism, and Literary Production at Millbrook Commune

Commentator, Allison Horrocks

 

2:45 – 3:00 pm, COFFEE AND COOKIES BREAK
Class of 1947 Room

 

SESSION B, 3:15-5:00 pm

Panel Three, PROTESTING THE STATUS QUO
Class of 1947 Room
Chair, Casey Green

Jorell A. Meléndez-Badillo, Imagining Resistance: Organizing the Puerto Rican Southern Agricultural Strike of 1905

Claudio Luis Quaresma Daflon, Samba and the Expansion of Popular Citizenship in Rio de Janeiro, 1937-1945

Cara Palmer, “Our Silence Buys the Battles”: The Place of Protest Music in the United States-Central American Peace and Solidarity Movement

Commentator, Veronika Horvath

5:15-6:15 pm KEYNOTE ADDRESS
Class of 1947 Room

Anne Valk, Associate Director for Public Humanities at the Center for Learning in Action, Williams College

“Community Oral History and Public Humanities in Theory and Practice”

Anne Valk is associate director for Public Humanities at the Center for Learning in Action at Williams College. A historian by training, Valk specializes in 20th century U.S. social history. At the Center for Public Humanities at Brown University, Valk coordinated the Fox Point Oral History Project, the Mashapaug Pond/Reservoir Triangle Collection project, and worked with local researchers and community members interested in community history. She has taught oral history and public humanities courses, worked with students on practicums, and is involved in developing public programs. She recently published a collection of oral history interviews, Living with Jim Crow: African American Women and Memories of the Jim Crow South (Palgrave, 2010), using interviews housed at Duke University. Valk is currently a series editor for Humanities and Public Life, a new publishing initiative of the University of Iowa Press. Valk also sits on the National Advisory Board of Imagining America.