Upcoming Events
Photo Credit: Duke University Press: https://www.dukeupress.edu/made-in-nuyorico
March 4, 2026
In-person event starting at 6:00pm
In Made in NuYoRico, WSRC Scholar Marisol Negrón tells the cultural history of salsa, tracing the music’s Nuyorican meanings over a fifty-year period that begins with the establishment of Fania Records in 1964 and how it capitalized on salsa’s Nuyorican imaginary to cultivate a global audience.
Drawing on interviews with fans, legendary musicians, and music industry figures as well as analyses of songs, albums, films, and archival documents, Negrón shows how Nuyorican cultural and social histories became embedded in and impacted salsa music's flows during its foundational period in the mid-1960s and its boom in the 1970s.
Salsa’s Nuyorican aesthetics challenged mainstream notions of Americanness and Puerto Ricanness and produced an alternative public sphere through which New York’s poor and working-class Puerto Ricans could contest racialization and colonial power. By outlining salsa’s complicated musical, cultural, commercial, racial, gendered, legal, and political entanglements, Negrón demonstrates its centrality to Nuyorican identity and subjectivity.
Author Marisol Negrón, Associate Professor American Studies and Latino Studies and Director, Latino Studies Program will sit in conversation at the WSRC with Professor Faith Smith, Department Chair, Marta F. Kauffman Chair in African and African American Studies, and Professor of English.
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.
March 18, 2026
In-person event starting at 4:00pm
Join Artist Alison Croney Moses, a recent Foster Prize winner (ICA Boston) & Rappaport Prize winner (DeCordova Museum), whose work is currently featured in the Rose Art Museum permanent collection, and Donna Dodson, a Brandeis University Women's Studies Research Center (WSRC) Artist/Scholar whose Match of the Matriarchs, a life-size all female chess set which is believed to be the world's first and only, in conversation with author Deirdre Visser, author of Joints, Joinery and Gender a History of Woodworking for the 21st Century, on Wednesday March 18th from 4p-5:30p at the Brandeis University WSRC.
As artists, educators, small business owners, entrepreneurs, scholars, and authors, Moses, Visser and Dodson will explore how the arts, civic participation, and community engagement converge in the Boston arts community. Light reception to follow.
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.
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.
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