Upcoming Events
March 26, 2026
In-person event starting at 5:30pm
WSRC Alumni Scholar Kate Price grew up in a small mill town in central Pennsylvania with her sister and parents in northern Appalachia. At the insistence of her mother, and through her academic accomplishments, Price escaped the unbroken cycles of poverty, violence, addiction, mental illness, and abuse that had plagued her family for generations. She started a new life in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in pursuit of her Master’s and PhD. But despite having left this dark world behind, it still kept a firm grip on her.
Overcome with unexplainable grief and sadness and having sustained a series of hazy flashbacks accompanied by a “chilling of her blood and uncomfortable feeling in her bones,” Price sought out Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, a trauma specialist to help heal her constant emotional pain through EMDR therapy. When Price, whose brain had been protecting her by shutting out these horrific memories, felt safe enough, she along with van der Kolk as her guide, discovered what that darkness that lay within her was. Her father had abused and trafficked her as a child.
In This Happened To Me: A Memoir, an exquisitely rendered, transformative memoir, Price describes how she broke free of that which had defined her childhood and went on to create a purpose-driven life and family, on her own terms. Kate Price is an associate research scientist at the Wellesley Centers for Women, a research institute at Wellesley College. She is also an advisor for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s Child Sex Trafficking Expert Working Group and Global Platform for Child Exploitation Policy. She will be joined in conversation about her recent book by WSRC Scholar Michelle Bowdler, author of Is Rape a Crime? A Memoir, and Investigation and a Manifesto (2020 Flatiron Books), longlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction and named a Must Read by Time Magazine.
Location: Women's Studies Research Center of Brandeis, 515 South Street, Waltham, MA 02453. Entrance is located on the righthand side of the building with brick stairs and purple awning. Ample free parking is located in front and behind the building.
April 16, 2026
In-Person event starting at 6:00pm
Deborah B. Goldberg is the Massachusetts State Treasurer and Receiver General. In that role, she is responsible for the state’s cash and debt management, unclaimed property, and chairs state boards and commissions, including the Massachusetts School Building Authority, the Pension Reserves Investment Management Board, the State Board of Retirement, Massachusetts State Lottery Commission, and the Massachusetts Clean Water Trust. In 2015, she established the Office of Economic Empowerment, the first of its kind in the country, and chairs its Economic Empowerment Trust Fund. Treasurer Goldberg is the former President of the National Association of State Treasurers and is the Chair of the National Institute of Public Finance.
Drawing upon her expertise and experience in both the private and public sectors, Treasurer Goldberg has promoted fiscal policies and programs to ensure opportunity for all.
An active and engaged volunteer, Treasurer Goldberg is the President Emeritus of Adoptions with Love, a member of the Greater Boston Food Bank Advisory Board, a founder of Berkshire Hills Music Academy – a school for individuals with intellectual disabilities – a trustee emeritus at Beth Israel Lahey Health, and a former Director at Affiliated Physicians Group / Beth Israel Deaconess HealthCare. Her philanthropic work includes associations with The Miriam Fund, the 100 Club, United Way, and the Combined Jewish Philanthropies.
This event will be held in-person at the Brandeis University Women's Studies Research Center, Epstein Building (brick stairs and aluminum ramp with a purple awning on the right side of the building), 515 South Street (right across from the train tracks), Waltham, MA 02453
Located directly across from the MBTA station, ample parking is available in the front and back of the building.
We look forward to seeing you.
April 23, 2026
In-Person event starting at 6:00pm.
Award-winning author Natalie Dykstra will discuss her biography Chasing Beauty as well as Isabella Stewart Gardner, a complex and singular woman behind one of the most fascinating museums in the nation and the world—a tale of beauty and loss, grit and American self-invention.
Isabella Stewart Gardner’s museum, with its plain exterior enfolding an astonishing four-story Italian palazzo, rose from Boston’s Fens at the turn of the twentieth century. Its treasures encompassed not only masterwork paintings but tapestries, rare books, prints, porcelains, and fine furniture.
Chasing Beauty illuminates the fascinating ways the museum and its holdings can be seen as a kind of memoir, dazzling and haunting, created with objects instead of words and displayed per Isabella’s wishes in the exact placements she initially curated.
Born in 1840 to a privileged New York family, Isabella Stewart married Boston Brahmin Jack Gardner as she turned twenty. She was misunderstood by Boston’s insular society and suffered the death of her only child, a beloved boy, not yet two years old. But in time this Gilded Age art patron found friendships, glittering and bohemian; awe-inspiring world travels; and collecting beautiful things with a keen eye and competitive pace—all these were balm for loss.
In conversation with Natalie Dykstra will be Cynthia L. Berenson, who serves on the University Board of Trustees, as well as the boards of the Women’s Studies Research Center and the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Brandeis University.
April 23, 2026
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