Events Archive 2009-2010
2009 Opening Reception
Tuesday, September 15
5:30-7:30 pm
President's Room | Woolsey Hall
Please join the Women Faculty Forum for our ninth annual reception to inaugurate the year, welcome new faculty and administrators, and celebrate the successes of new and old colleagues.
Welcoming remarks by the Women Faculty Forum Co-Chairs:
Shirley McCarthy
Professor Diagnostic Radiology and Professor of Obstetrics & Gynecology
Laura Wexler
Professor of American Studies and Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Honoring the accomplishments of:
Mary Miller
Dean of Yale College
Introduction by:
Howard Lamar
Sterling Professor of History and Former President of the University
Recognition of:
Inderpal Grewal
Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Frances Rosenbluth
Deputy Provost for Faculty Development and Damon Wells Professor of International Politics
Alice Prochaksa
University Librarian
Yale Babysitting Networking Event
Friday, November 6
12:00 - 1:00 pm
Hall of Graduate Studies
320 York Street, Room 119
The YBS Networking Event gives parents the opportunity to meet a variety of interested Yale babysitters in a short amount of time.
In order to participate, parents and babysitters must register at www.yale.edu/babysitting.
Parents: Click "For Parents" to register
as a parent.
Yale Students: Click "For Babysitter"
to register as a sitter.
RSVP to wff@yale.edu or call 432 8847
by November 3.
To learn more about the Yale Babysitting Service, visit www.yale.edu/babysitting.
Cosponsored by the Yale WorkLife Program and the Women Faculty Forum.
Women Faculty Forum
40th Anniversary of
Coeducation Celebration
Saturday, January 30, 2010
In honor of the 40th anniversary of coeducation at Yale College, the Women Faculty Forum and the Steering Committee on the 40th Anniversary of Coeducation hosted a day of events in conjunction with the Yale University Art Gallery.
The morning began with a preview of the WFF tour of women’s history at Yale. The afternoon program took place in the Yale University Art Gallery auditorium and included a screening of Boola Boola...Yale Goes Co-ed, a discussion with the filmmakers, Julia Pimsleur and Eliza Byard, and a panel featuring alumnae/i, former and current administrators and faculty discussing the process of coeducating Yale.
Read the Yale Daily News article about the Women Faculty Forum 40th Anniversary of Coeducation Celebration.
11:00 am: Tour of Women’s History at Yale
Presentation on gendered spaces at Yale by Alice Moore, MFA '04, PhD candidate in American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, followed by a tour through Yale’s campus documenting women’s history at Yale University.
Tour begins at Linsly-Chittenden Hall, Room 102 (63 High Street)
1:30 – 2:30 pm: Screening of Boola, Boola...Yale Goes Co-ed
Yale University Art Gallery
Robert L. McNeil Jr. Lecture Hall (1111 Chapel Street)
2:30 – 3:00 pm: The Making of Boola Boola
Discussion with film producers, Julia Pimsleur, YC '90 and Eliza Byard, YC '90, about the process of making the film. Moderated by Presca Ahn, YC '10.
3:00 – 3:20 pm: Break
3:20 – 4:10 pm: Coeducating Yale: An Alumnae/i Perspective
Panelists will reflect on their experiences at Yale being students at the time of coeducation. How did this impact their lives at Yale and after? How did the change in coeducation at schools like Yale impact society as a whole?
- Michael Kane, YC '70, Coeducation Week Organizer from Ezra Stiles College
- Laurie Stevens, YC '75, Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Columbia University
- Margaret Homans, YC '74, PhD '78, Professor of English and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Yale University
- Moderated by Laura Wexler, Professor of American Studies, Professor of Women's Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Women Faculty Forum Co-Chair
4:10 – 5:00 pm: Coeducating Yale: The Administrators Who Helped Make it Happen and Where We Are Today
Panelists will reflect on their experiences, challenges, and goals helping Yale coeducate. Have the goals of coeducation been accomplished or are there more that need to be completed?
- John Wilkinson, YC '60, MAT '63, MAH '79, Associate Dean of Yale College from 1968-1974
- Kai Erikson, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor Emeritus of Sociology and American Studies, former Master of Trumbull College
- Elga Wasserman, JD '76, Special Assistant to the President on the Education of Women and Chairman of the Committee on Coeducation
- Mary Miller, PhD '81, Dean of Yale College
- Moderated by Paula Kavathas, Professor of Laboratory Medicine, Professor of Immunobiology and Genetics
5:00 – 6:00 pm: Reception
Performances by The New Blue and Whim 'n Rhythm, two all-female a cappella singing groups at Yale.
Presca Ahn, YC '10
Presca Ahn is a senior English major from New York City. A former Women's Center board member, she is directing a documentary about Yale's first year of coeducation. Presca has worked at Vogue Magazine, Yale University Press, Condé Nast Portfolio, CNBC, and CNN; at present, she is a multimedia editor for Yale's YouTube and iTunes broadcasts and a contributing writer at the New Haven Advocate.
Eliza Byard, YC '90, Producer of "Boola Boola...Yale Goes Coed"
Eliza Byard (TD '90) is the Executive Director of GLSEN (The Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network). She previously served as the organization's Deputy Executive Director, primarily responsible for all of GLSEN's programming, which aims to eliminate homophobic violence and bias in K-12 schools nationwide. Those programs include the National Day of Silence, support for the student clubs generally known as Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs), and the first Ad Council campaign to address LGBT issues. She is GLSEN's primary spokesperson and currently serves on Mayor Michael Bloomberg's Commission on Runaway and Homeless LGBT Youth.
Prior to joining GLSEN in 2001, Byard worked on numerous award-winning documentary productions, including Out of the Past (Sundance Audience Award, 1998)), School Colors (DuPont-Columbia Award, 1994), and Genesis: A Living Conversation with Bill Moyers. She is currently the chair of the board of directors of Arts Engine, a non-profit dedicated to the production, distribution and effective use of social issue media that was co-founded by
Julia Pimsleur. Byard holds a PhD in United States History from Columbia University.
Kai Erikson, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor Emeritus of Sociology and American Studies, former Master of Trumbull College
Kai Erikson is past president of the American Sociological Association, the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and the Eastern Sociological Society. He has been a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and a Visiting Scholar of the Russell Sage Foundation. He is the author of Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance, which won the MacIver Award of the ASA; and of Everything In Its Path, which won the Sorokin Award of the ASA. He is the only sociologist to ever twice win the top award of the Association for the best book of the year. His latest book is entitled A New Species of Trouble: Explorations in Disaster, Trauma, and Community. His research and teaching interests include American communities, human disasters, and ethnonational conflict. He has been Master of Trumbull College, Chair of the American Studies program at Yale, editor of The Yale Review, and Chair of the Department of Sociology.
Margaret Homans, YC '74, PhD '78, Professor of English and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Yale University
Margaret Homans has taught at Yale since 1978. She writes and teaches about nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and feminist criticism and theory, with particular interest in George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. She is the author of Women Writers and Poetic Identity: Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Bronte, and Emily Dickinson (1980); Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing (1986); Royal Representations: Queen Victorian and Victorian Culture, 1837-1876; and essays on Victorian literature, on recent African American women writers, on feminist criticism and theory, and on adoption. She is currently writing a book about adoption narratives and feminist theory. She is co-editor of Remaking Queen Victoria (1997). Professor Homans received her BA and PhD from Yale University.
Michael Kane, YC '70, Coeducation Week Organizer from Ezra Stiles College
Michael Kane was a member of the student committee that organized Co-Ed Week in fall 1968, which helped persuade the Yale Administration and Corporation to admit undergraduate women to Yale. He attended Yale Graduate School in Political Science but left academe to pursue social and economic justice. Kane settled in the Boston area, where he has built a distinguished career as an organizer and advocate for housing rights and empowerment of lower income people. In the 1970s, Kane played a key role in campaigns to limit airport expansion, divest Massachusetts pension funds from South Africa, and build the award winning Tent City housing development, among others. Since 1983, Kane has served as the Director of the Mass Alliance of HUD Tenants, which has preserved more than 9,700 low income apartments through tenant organizing, including 1,370 in eight resident-controlled developments. Since 1992, Kane has also served as the Executive Director of the National Alliance of HUD Tenants, the only national tenants’ union in the US. Kane has been a Board member of the Habitat International Coalition, the leading global housing rights advocacy organization, since 2004.
Paula Kavathas, Professor of Laboratory Medicine, Professor of Immunobiology and Genetics, Yale School of Medicine
Paula Kavathas joined the Yale faculty in 1986 and is Professor of Laboratory Medicine, Genetics and Immunobiology. Her research focuses on the immune response to the bacteria /Chlamydia Trachomatis/ and on a receptor called CD8 that is important for killer T cell function. In addition, to her graduate school teaching activities, she teaches a Yale undergraduate course "Immunology and Microorganisms." She served as Chair of the American Association of Immunologists Committee on the Status of Women from 1998-2001 and published an article on the slow progress in the advancement of women in Immunology (Nature Immunology 2:985, 2001). She is founder and director of the Science Education Outreach Program, established in 1995 and has served on NIH study sections for the past 15 years as member and chair. She received the Liza Cariaga-Lo Award for Diversity in Scholarship and Service from the graduate school in 2009. Her Ph.D. is from the University of Wisconsin and postdoctoral work at Stanford University.
Mary Miller, PhD '81, Dean of Yale College
Mary Miller, Sterling Professor of History of Art, became dean of Yale College on December 1, 2008. A prominent art historian, Miller has been a member of the Yale faculty since 1981. She was the Vincent J. Scully Professor of History of Art from 1998 until her appointment to the Sterling Professorship ten years later. Prior to assuming the deanship, Miller served as master of Saybrook College for nearly a decade. Her husband, Edward Kamens, is the Sumitomo Professor of Japanese Studies and served as acting master of Saybrook from December 2008 through the end of the 2008-2009 academic year.
Miller earned her A.B. from Princeton in 1975 and her Ph.D. from Yale in 1981. She has served as chair of the Department of History of Art, chair of the Council on Latin American Studies, director of Graduate Studies in Archeological Studies, and as a member of the Steering Committee of the Women Faculty Forum at Yale.
Specializing in the art of the ancient New World, in 2004 Miller curated The Courtly Art of the Ancient Maya at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. For that exhibition, she wrote the catalogue of the same title with Simon Martin, senior epigrapher at the University of Pennsylvania Museum. She is also completing the work of her archaeological project to document and reconstruct the Maya wall paintings at Bonampak, Mexico.
For her work on the Maya, Miller has won national recognition including a Guggenheim Fellowship. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994. She has been chosen to deliver the two most prestigious lecture series in her discipline: she will give the A.W. Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art in spring 2010 and the Slade Lectures at Cambridge University in 2014-2015.
Alice Moore, MFA '04, PhD in American Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Yale University
Alice Rebecca Moore, a graduate student in the American Studies program at Yale, has been preoccupied for years with Yale’s gendered spaces, iconographies, and histories. Out of that interest, she has shaped today’s featured walking tour and also two unpublished papers. One, "Seeing the Yale Man," is a feminist critique of the coffee-table book The Yale Album: The First 300 Years (2003). The other, titled "Remembering the Yale Fence, or, When the Yale Man was Visible,” analyzes the history and politics suggested by the bas relief of the old Yale Fence at the corner of College and Chapel Streets. Her dissertation work explores the visual and performance cultures of Fredericksburg and New Braunfels, Texas, from their founding as German colonies in the middle of the nineteenth century through the celebration a century later of local World War Two hero Admiral Chester W. Nimitz. Alice holds M.Phil. and M.A. degrees in American Studies at Yale, an M.F.A. in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism from the Yale School of Drama, and a B.A. in Theatre and German Literature from Wesleyan University.
Julia Pimsleur, YC '90, Producer of "Boola Boola...Yale Goes Coed"
Julia Pimsleur Levine is the President of the Little Pim Corporation, which produces and distributes the Little Pim: fun with languages series to introduce young children to a second language. Her background is in filmmaking, having produced award-winning documentary films that were shown on HBO, CinemaxReelife and PBS. Pimsleur Levine was inspired to create Little Pim in part from having grown up in the language teaching business. Her father, Dr. Paul Pimsleur, created one of the most popular and acclaimed audio teaching language methods for adults, The Pimsleur MethodTM. When developing Little Pim's Entertainment Immersion MethodTM, she was inspired in part by her father's research, and drew from her filmmaking background, as well as her own experience as a mother and language teacher. Little Pim has sold thousands of copies since its launch in 2008, is sold in Barnes and Noble nation-wide, available over 200 retail outlets across the country and is available in 10 languages. Little Pim has expanded to other materials for language learning such as flash cards, CDs and iPhone apps, and is currently working with PBS to create the first foreign language teaching game for its subscription web site, PBSKidsplay.
Laurie Stevens, YC '75, Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Columbia University
Laurie Stevens was admitted to Yale in the third year of coeducation. After Yale, she completed her medical degree at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. Following medical school, she did her internship in General Surgery at the Harvard Surgical Service and then residency training in Psychiatry at the New York State Psychiatric Institute in New York City. Dr. Stevens completed a fellowship in Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry, treating patients at the interface of psychiatry, medicine and surgery, at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center. Her clinical research has focused on the psychological aspects of medical and surgical illnesses, such as breast cancer and breast reconstruction, neurological illnesses and plastic surgical problems. Dr. Stevens currently is an Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University and has an active private practice in New York City. She was the recipient of the Whipple Prize in General Surgery and prizes for research in the fields of psychiatry and plastic surgery.
Elga Wasserman, JD '76, Special Assistant to the President on the Education of Women and Chairman of the Committee on Coeducation
After graduating from Smith College and earning a PhD in chemistry at Radcliffe/Harvard, Elga Wasserman worked in various capacities as a chemist in industry and academia while raising three young children. She began working at Yale as assistant dean of the Graduate School in 1962 and remained there until November 1968, when President Brewster asked her to oversee the admission of women undergraduates to Yale College in the fall of 1969, together with Sam Chauncey. She worked as Brewster’s Special Assistant and as Chair of the Coeducation Committee until 1973, when she entered Yale Law School as a member of the class of 1976.
After graduation from law school, Wasserman spent one year clerking on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. From 1977 until 1994 she practiced law in New Haven. She spent the next five years writing a book based on interviews with the relatively small number of women who had been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, The Door in the Dream: Conversations with Eminent Women in Science, published in 2000 by the Joseph Henry Press, a division of the National Academy Press. Since that time she has lectured widely on women, science, equal opportunity and the lack thereof, and gradually retired. She and her husband moved to Lexington, Massachusetts in 2006 and are now enjoying spending more time with our family, trying to stay fit, and forming many stimulating new friendships.
Laura Wexler, Professor of American Studies, Professor of Women's Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Women Faculty Forum Co-Chair
Laura Wexler is Professor of American Studies, Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Co-Chair of the Women Faculty Forum at Yale. She holds an affiliation with the Film Studies Program, the Program in Ethnicity, Race and Migration, and the Public Humanities Program. She chaired the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program from 2003-2007. In 1999 she founded, and she continues to direct, the Photographic Memory Workshop at Yale. From 2007 to the present she has been a Principal Investigator of the Women, Religion and Globalization Project, supported by a grant from the Henry R. Luce Foundation as well as a grant from the William and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale. Wexler’s scholarship centers upon intersections of race, gender, sexuality and class with film and photography in the United States, from the nineteenth century to the present. Her book, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U. S. Imperialism, won the Joan Kelley Memorial Prize of the American Historical Association for the best book in women’s history and/or feminist theory. She is co-author, with Sandra Matthews, of Pregnant Pictures, and co-editor, with Laura Frost, Amy Hungerford and John MacKay, of Interpretation and the Holocaust. Her most recent publication is: “No Doubt the Cubans!” in A New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors (Harvard University Press, 2009). Currently she is working on a monograph entitled The Awakening of Cultural Memory, using historical photographs as a source of resistance to the politics of white supremacy in the formation of contemporary American reading practices. In addition, she is composing a volume of essays entitled The Look, the Gaze and the Relay Race: Photography and Everyday Memory, exploring of the work of Diane Arbus, Roman Vishniac, Randolf Linsly Simpson, and the F.S.A./O.W.I. photographers, among others. Professor Wexler has served on the Editorial Boards of The Little Magazine, American Quarterly, Genders, and the Yale Journal of Criticism. She is a current Fellow of the Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference at Columbia University, a former Fellow of the Whitney Humanities Center of Yale University, and is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Muriel Gardiner Society for Psychoanalysis and the Humanities, and the Board of Trustees of the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale. Professor Wexler completed her undergraduate studies at Sarah Lawrence College, having also attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she studied photography. She holds M.A., M. Phil., and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University in English and Comparative Literature. Besides Yale University, she has taught at Columbia University, Amherst College, Trinity College, Wesleyan University, and Peking University where, in Fall, 2008, she taught courses on Women’s Studies and on the History of Photography.
John Wilkinson, YC '60, MAT '63, MAH '79, Associate Dean of Yale College from 1968-1974
John Wilkinson arrived in New Haven in September, 1956, as a freshman in an all male, mostly homogeneous Yale College and left in 1974 as Associate Dean of Yale College and Dean of Undergraduate Affairs to complete the coeducation of a secondary school, which had been resolutely all male for over 300 years. In those eighteen years at Yale, as student in three schools and in several roles as a dean, Wilkinson participated in a magnificent transformation of the University, one which was always exciting, sometimes even frightening, but with a stunningly positive effect.
His second act at Yale was with my classmate Bart Giamatti, who brought me back as VP for Development and then Secretary of the University. Those nine years were no less exciting, though the challenges often differed, but again Yale became a better and stronger institution, a truly great international university. All this prepared him for two more stints as a head of school, one Quaker and the other Benedictine, again leading one to coeducation, and ultimately back home to New Haven to an active, though less stressful, retirement.
February 2010
Nikki Giovanni
Wednesday, February 24, 5:30 pm
Yale Law School Auditorium
The Charles T. Davis Lecture (in celebration of 40th Anniversaries for AfAm Center, African American Studies and Coeducation at Yale) presents a reading and book-signing with renowned poet and the “priestess of black poetry.” Nikki Giovanni, is a world-renowned poet, powerful literary voice, activist, and educator. Over the past forty years, her outspokenness, in her writing and in lectures, has brought the eyes of the world upon her. One of the most widely-read American poets, author of 30 books, and Grammy nominee, she prides herself on being “a Black American, a daughter, a mother, a professor of English.” Spanning the themes of love and sex, anger and grief, race, politics, and violence, Giovanni remains as determined and committed as ever to the fight for human rights and equality. Always insisting on presenting the truth as she sees it, she has maintained a prominent place as a strong voice of the Black community. Her focus is on the individual, specifically, on the power one has to make a difference in oneself, and thus, in the lives of others.
Sponsored by the Afro-American Cultural Center, in partnership with the Yale African American Affinity Group (YAAA) and the Calhoun College Charles T. Davis Lecture, Office of the President, Office of Diversity & Inclusion, African American Studies Department, Beinecke Rare Book Library, Divinity School, School of Nursing, Graduate School Office for Diversity and Equal Opportunity, and the Women Faculty Forum.
April 2010
Annual Lecture in Memory of Naomi Schor
“Susan Sontag’s Parisian Year”
Alice Kaplan
Department of French, Yale University
Wednesday, April 7, 2010, 4:00 pm
Whitney Humanities Center
53 Wall Street, Room 208
Sponsored by the Naomi Schor Memorial Lecture Fund, the Department of French, the Whitney Humanities Center, the Women Faculty Forum and the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program
WGSS and LGBTS Anniversaries Conference
Celebrating 30 years of Innovative Scholarship at Yale
This year marks the 30th anniversary of Women’s Studies at Yale—thirty years, that is, of extraordinary work by incredible people. Wave upon wave of visionary students, faculty, staff, and administrators have worked together over these decades to build the vibrant collaborative programs we have today: Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies.
We hope you’ll join in the celebration! We’re inviting you all back to Yale for a weekend of anniversary festivities and thoughtful discussion—for an expansive, inclusive reunion that will create new communities even as it reunites old ones.
Some of our illustrious former faculty and students will be here to reflect upon their personal intellectual trajectories; others will speak about critical issues within the fields of gender and sexuality studies; still others will lead more intimate workshops and discussions in which we consider the impact of this scholarship upon our personal, political, and professional lives. The organizing committee is also coordinating activities outside the seminar rooms and lecture halls: a captivating women’s history walking tour of the campus, a fabulous student-created theater piece about the history of sexuality and gender at Yale, and—more somberly—a memorial gathering in which to remember those we’ve lost. And we know we’ll all want plenty of unstructured time to talk, so there will be easy and delicious coffees, receptions, and meals throughout the weekend.
For the complete schedule of events, visit the conference website.
Hosted by Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies, with generous support from the Yale Provost’s Office, the Women Faculty Forum, and the Whitney Humanities Center.
