Past Events

A visitor exploring Andrea Bowers' Political Ribbons (Brandeis University), 2024, Silkscreen ink on satin ribbons, Dimensions variable, Courtesy of the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York and Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco Wrongs & RIGHTS, Curated by Laura Dvorkin and Maynard Monrow, Kniznick Gallery, Women's Studies Research Center, Brandeis University
Photo Credit: Photo by Sam Brower
January 23, 2025
Join us to hear Andrea Bowers, "one of America's foremost political artists" (NYTimes), in conversation with Peter Kalb, Chair of the Fine Arts Department at Brandeis
when: 4:30pm
where: the Liberman-Miller Lecture Hall at the WSRC, 515 South Street, Waltham, MA 02453
For over thirty years, artist Andrea Bowers (American, b. 1965) has made art across a variety of mediums, from video to colored pencil to installation art, that activates. Her work combines an artistic practice with activism and advocacy, speaking to deeply entrenched social and political inequities as well as the generations of activists working to create a fairer and more just world. "Bowers has built an international reputation as a chronicler of contemporary history, documenting activism as it unfolds and collecting research on the front lines of protest. Her practice contends with issues such as immigration rights, workers' rights, climate justice, and women's rights, illustrating the shared pursuit of justice that connects them." (The Hammer Museum at UCLA)
Peter R. Kalb is the Cynthia L. and Theodore S. Berenson Associate Professor of Contemporary Art and Chair of the Fine Arts Department at Brandeis University where he teaches modern and contemporary art history. He was also recently appointed to the core faculty of the Brandeis Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies Department. He is the author of Art Since 1980: Charting the Contemporary, (Pearson and Laurence King: New York and London, 2014) which details the expanding contemporary art world from its New York explosion in the early 1980s to its global expanse in the 21st century. Before preparing Art Since 1980, he was the revising author of the Fifth Edition of H.H. Arnason History of Modern Art and the author of High Drama: The New York Cityscapes of Georgia O’Keeffe and Margaret Bourke-White. Current projects include research on artists responses to the Apollo Mission, a series of articles on the politics of representation as evident in the work of Andrea Bowers, writing on the innovative practice of bricolage in the work of Tom Sachs, and the intersection of archeology and art history in the contemporary art world. A reception with the artist will follow.

November 19, 2024
Chicago, early 1970s. Who does a woman call when she needs help? Jane.
The best-known secret in the city, Jane is an underground health clinic composed entirely of women helping women, empowering them to embrace their futures by offering reproductive counseling and safe, illegal abortions. Veronica, Jane’s founder, prides herself on the services she has provided to thousands of women, yet the price of others’ freedom is that she leads a double life. When she’s not at Jane, Veronica plays the role of a conventional housewife—a juggling act that becomes even more difficult during her own high-risk pregnancy.
Two more women in Veronica’s neighborhood are grappling with similar disconnects. Margaret, a young professor at the University of Chicago, secretly volunteers at Jane as she falls in love with a man whose attitude toward his ex-wife increasingly disturbs her. Patty, who’s long been content as a devoted wife and mother, has begun to sense that something essential is missing from her life.
In this historic moment, when the personal was nothing if not political, Veronica, Margaret, and Patty risk it all to help mothers, daughters, sisters, and friends. With an awe-inspiring story and appealing characters, "All You Have to Do Is Call" celebrates the power of women coming together in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.
This event was generously co-sponsored by the Brandeis University Creative Writing Program.

November 13, 2024
Margaret Morganroth Gullette is a cultural critic and anti-ageism pioneer whose prize-winning work is foundational in critical age studies. She is the author of several books, including "Agewise", "Aged by Culture", and "Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People". Her writing has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, Atlantic, Nation, and the Boston Globe.
We celebrated the release of her newest book, "American Eldercide: How It Happened, How to Prevent It".
Twenty percent of the Americans who have died of COVID since 2020 have been older and disabled adults residing in nursing homes—even though they make up fewer than one percent of the US population. Something about this catastrophic loss of life in government-monitored facilities has never added up.
Until now. In "American Eldercide", Margaret Morganroth Gullette investigates this tragic public health crisis with a passionate voice and razor-sharp attention to detail, showing us that nothing about it was inevitable. By unpacking the decisions that led to discrimination against nursing home residents, revealing how governments, doctors, and media reinforced agist or ableist biases, and collecting the previously little-heard voices of the residents who survived, Gullette helps us understand the workings of what she persuasively calls an eldercide.
Reviews for American Eldercide:
- "A masterpiece. Gullette writes with passion, a critical eye, and an often-sly sense of humor. She shows, in devastating detail, how we as a society failed our elderly population—and the lessons we must learn in order to avoid a similar catastrophe in the future.”—Harry Moody, former Vice President for Academic Affairs, AARP
- “A remarkable and vivid description of one of the worst chapters in the history of nursing homes—orchestrated by corporate greed and profiteering. It is a wake-up call for the need for total reform or elimination of the institutions where older people are sent to die without dignity or care.”—Charlene Harrington, University of California, San Francisco

October 23, 2024
Set in Gilded Age Boston, "The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann" tells the story of a successful woman author of romance and adventure novels who becomes a champion of women’s rights as she takes on the literary establishment and finds her true voice, both on and off the page. Everything changes for Victoria when she goes against her publisher’s expectations and abandons her frivolous style to tell her own story. She loses her income, her husband, and her standing with her publisher as she joins the legions of hard-working women who have been her most faithful readers. As she fights on behalf of these women, her new young Harvard-educated editor becomes her unexpected ally, while he himself dares to become a more liberated, modern gentleman.
"The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann" shows writing and reading as acts of defiance that can liberate us from narrow, constrained lives, and how revision in life and revision on the page are intimately entwined.
This event was generously co-sponsored by the Brandeis University Creative Writing Program.
October 16, 2024
Religion, politics, and tradition are often understood as the site where women’s bodies and their rights are debated. The field of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies suggests instead that women’s bodies become the sites where debates of culture and politics take shape. As Barbara Kruger reminds us, “your body is a battleground.” This conversation, built around our Kniznick Gallery's current exhibition Wrongs & RIGHTS, brings together different perspectives on art, gender, and politics.
Ruth Erickson, Barbara Lee Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, has been a driving force in the ICA’s curatorial department since joining the museum in 2014. A curator and scholar of contemporary art, she is deeply committed to facilitating artists and institutions working together to create meaningful exhibitions, books, and programs that promote justice and inspire curiosity in the world. Before joining the ICA, Erickson was a fellow at the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia (2008–10) and served as curator at Burlington City Arts (BCA) (2004–7). She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Pennsylvania, and was the recipient of a prestigious Center for Curatorial Leadership Fellowship in 2022.
Jameson Johnson is a writer, curator, and community organizer based in Boston. She is the founder and executive director at Boston Art Review, an online and print publication founded in 2017 committed to facilitating discourse around contemporary art in Boston and beyond. She has held positions at the MIT List Visual Arts Center and currently serves on the board of Catalyst Conversations and the Foundry Arts Consortium’s Advisory Committee as well as the MassArt Auction Committee. She has curated exhibitions at Boston Center for the Arts, Fountain Street Gallery, and Boston Cyberarts, as well as served on numerous juries across New England. Her writing has also appeared in Artsy, Artnet, and the Boston Globe among others.
Courtney Stock is an artist living and working in Boston, MA. She has exhibited at Praise Shadows Art Gallery, Brookline, MA; SPRING/BREAK Secret Show, New York, NY; Boston University Art Galleries, Boston, MA; Southern Vermont Art Center, Manchester, VT; MassArt x SoWa Gallery, Boston, MA; and the Forsberg Art Gallery, Longview, WA. Stock earned an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate from San Francisco Art Institute, and a BA from Bowdoin College. She teaches at Framingham State University and Cloth Collaborative, an artist-run fiber studio in Hyde Park.
"Our Bodies, Their Battleground: Art, Gender, and Politics" is presented in conjunction with "Wrongs & RIGHTS", curated by Laura Dvorkin and Maynard Monrow, and on view in the Kniznick Gallery through January 30, 2025.

September 24, 2024
This is a new novel of friendship, betrayal, and redemption set against three transformative decades in Tehran, Iran.In 1950s Tehran, seven-year-old Ellie lives in grand comfort until the untimely death of her father, forcing Ellie and her mother to move to a tiny home downtown. Lonely and bearing the brunt of her mother’s endless grievances, Ellie dreams of a friend to alleviate her isolation.
Luckily, on the first day of school, she meets Homa, a kind, passionate girl with a brave and irrepressible spirit. Together, the two girls play games, learn to cook in the stone kitchen of Homa’s warm home, wander through the colorful stalls of the Grand Bazaar, and share their ambitions for becoming “lion women.”
But their happiness is disrupted when Ellie and her mother are afforded the opportunity to return to their previous bourgeois life. Now a popular student at the best girls’ high school in Iran, Ellie’s memories of Homa begin to fade. Years later, however, her sudden reappearance in Ellie’s privileged world alters the course of both of their lives.
Together, the two young women come of age and pursue their own goals for meaningful futures. But as the political turmoil in Iran builds to a breaking point, one earth-shattering betrayal will have enormous consequences.
"The Lion Women of Tehran" is a sweeping exploration of how profoundly we are shaped by those we meet when we are young, and the way love and courage transforms our lives.

September 18, 2024
Brandeis University’s ENACT: The Educational Network for Active Civic Transformation and the Women’s Studies Research Center welcomed the Bad Old Days Posse for a conversation on what life was like for pregnant people before the protections enshrined in Roe v. Wade. The Bad Old Days Posse writes, “We believe we have a unique perspective—and the responsibility to use our experiences—to tell our stories of living in a pre-Roe world, the limited choices available, and the risks we took to make the decisions that were right for us.” The Bad Old Days Posse is affiliated with Reproductive Equity Now.

Lisa Anne Auerbach, Rights, 2022, Video
Photo Credit: Courtesy of the artist and GAVLAK Gallery Los Angeles | Palm Beach
September 12, 2024
"Wrongs & RIGHTS" brings together five decades of work supporting the intergenerational battle for reproductive rights, while speaking in a wider sense to the erosion of rights in America after the June 2022 overturn of Roe v. Wade. Presenting over 20 pieces in various media, the exhibition was a mere sample of the countless works and rich perspectives on the subject, created by artists across all backgrounds, genders, and generations. We owe a debt of gratitude to artists and creators for their contributions to our fight for bodily autonomy and freedom.
"Wrongs & RIGHTS" is co-curated by Laura Dvorkin and Maynard Monrow of The Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection and was first presented at The Rudin Family Gallery, Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2022. The exhibition included works both selected from the BRD Collection and chosen directly from artists' studios.

Photo Credit: Photo courtesy of Penta Springs Limited/ Alamy Stock Photo. Design by Karin Rosenthal
May 6, 2024
HBI’s Holocaust Research Study Group hosted a public event to honor Holocaust Remembrance Day, Yom HaShoah. Our panel focused on how the memory of the Holocaust exists in complex personal and political conversations surrounding the contested narratives of Israel and Palestine, the Gaza War, and its repercussions.
Two presentations were offered prior to a panel discussion by members of the Holocaust Research Study Group:
- Sarah Silberstein Swartz, “How I Learned to Listen to the Other Side: A Personal Reflection on the Israel/Palestine Conflict”
- Laurel Leff, “How Not to Learn from History: The Holocaust in Press Coverage of the Gaza War”
May 2, 2024
"A Trick of Light or Distance" artist Hong Hong spoke about her process, influences, and content alongside her work in the exhibition.
Each summer and fall, Hong Hong (b. 1989, Hefei, Anhui, China) travels to faraway and distinct locations to make paper under the sky. The environmental, site-specific investigations map interstitial relationships between landscape, time, and the body through cartographic, symbolic, and material languages. During the winter and spring, she forms paintings directly on the floor of her studio. These schematics combine story-telling, text, and image-making to document states of interiority and subjectivity.
Hong is the recipient of a Tulsa Artist Fellowship (2024 - 2026), The Margie E. West Prize at University of Georgia (2024), a United States Artists Fellowship in Craft (2023), a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in Painting (2023), a Carnegie Foundation Fellowship at MacDowell (2020), a Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Fellowship at Vermont Studio Center (2019), an Artistic Excellence Fellowship from the Connecticut Office of Arts (2019), and a Creation of New Work Grant from the Edward C. And Ann T. Roberts Foundation (2018 - 2019). She also participated in residencies at McColl Center for Art + Innovation (2022), Houston Center for Contemporary Craft (2020 - 2021), Yaddo (2019), and I-Park (2018).
Hong has presented her work in exhibitions at Real Art Ways (Hartford, CT), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR), Fitchburg Art Museum (Fitchburg, MA), Ortega Y Gasset Projects (New York, NY), Georgia Museum of Art (Athens, GA), NXTHVN (New Haven, CT), San Francisco Center for Book Arts (San Francisco, CA), Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Los Angeles, CA), Akron Art Museum (Akron, OH), Texas Asia Society (Houston, TX), and University of Texas at Dallas (Dallas, TX), among others. Her practice has received press in publications such as Art21, Art New England, Southwest Contemporary, Boston Art Review, Hyperallergic, Public Parking, Two Coats of Paint, and Glasstire.
Hong’s solo exhibition, "A Body at the Center," is currently on-view at Rule Gallery in Denver, CO. She is also a part of Let the World In at Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland, ME. Hong lives and works in Massachusetts.
April 15, 2024
Virtual event
Organized by Brandeis professor Dorothy Kim, this session discussed online gender violence as a tool of toxic masculine culture and the political far-right. It also discussed organized resistance efforts among social justice activists, writers, academics, political figures, and legal experts.
April 4, 2024
Organized by Brandeis professor Brandon Callender, this session hosted speakers Ashlee Blackwell, writer and producer of "Horror Noire" and founder of Graveyard Shift Sisters, and Justin Phillip Reed, poet and author of the hybrid collection "With Bloom Upon Them And Also With Blood: A Horror Miscellany". Engaging artists and scholars working at the intersections of black feminist and black queer horror, it discussed how the horror film genre can thematize, trigger, and inspire complex engagements with sexual violence.

March 20, 2024
Tiziana Dearing, host of WBUR’s Radio Boston, a weekday broadcast that features provocative stories and authentic voices from Greater Boston, sat in conversation with Professor Harleen Singh, Director of the WSRC and Senior Associate Provost for Faculty and Global Affairs at Brandeis.
Prior to joining the Radio Boston team, Tiziana was a professor at Boston College’s School of Social Work where she taught social innovation and leadership. A longtime anti-poverty advocate, she also led Boston Rising, an antipoverty fund to end generational poverty in Boston, and was the first woman president of Catholic Charities for the Archdiocese of Boston. She and Professor Singh touched upon women in the public sphere, women’s voices, and women modulating the conversation.
Tiziana spoke and answered audience questions about her own career trajectory and professional roles ranging from professor to nonprofit executive to radio host, including her work as host of Phenomenal Women, a WBUR CitySpace series that invites women who have risen to the top of their professions to share their stories. Co-sponsored by the Metrowest Women’s Fund.
March 26, 2024
Organized by Brandeis professor Ilana Szobel, this session examined a wide range of issues unique to the experiences of sexual assault victims who have a cognitive, sensory, emotional, or mobility disability. By locating the conversations about sexual gendered violence in contemporary disability justice frameworks, the session focused on prevention of sexual violence against people with disabilities, modes of resistance and self-empowerment of disabled victims, as well as on the creation of support systems by and for survivors with disabilities.

March 16, 2024
Pre-concert talk at 7:30 p.m. followed by 30 minutes of music.
The premiere of "Muriel’s Songs," a major new song-cycle by Eric Chasalow, the Irving G. Fine Professor of Music and Chair of the Music Department, was the 2024 DiLuzio Concert of the Women’s Studies Research Center, co-sponsored by the Music Department.
Based on stories of a Jewish woman’s journey across 20th Century New York, the piece chronicles the memories of Eric’s grandmother, Muriel Gellert Chasalow, across the decades from age ten in 1913 through 1985. The text, drawn from her own stories, follows her life from a childhood attending a “mixed” school in Brooklyn, to Newark (and the Jewish mob), parenthood, multiple wars, grandparenthood, travel – mixing a shared American story with one that is very personal.
"Muriel’s Songs" was a 2022 commission of the Koussevitzky Music Foundation in the Library of Congress, in memory of composer Andrew Imbrie, for the Boston new music ensemble "Sound Icon" directed by Jeffrey Means. Sharon Harms was the soprano soloist.
February 27, 2024
Organized by Brandeis professor María J. Durán, this session addressed three interrelated topics: 1.) the conditions surrounding gender-based violence in the Northern Triangle (Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala) and its relationship to northward migration; 2.) the workplace as a site of violence against women in the border cities of Ciudad Juárez, MX and El Paso, TX; and 3.) the gynecological abuse of Latin American women immigrants in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers.

February 7, 2024
Susan Wilson spoke and answered questions about her exciting new book "Women and Children First: The Trailblazing Life of Susan Dimock, M.D."
In addition to being an author, Susan Wilson is also a photographer and public historian. She is the official House Historian of the Omni Parker House in Boston, an Affiliate Scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center, and an Honorary Fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Book Details
In 19th-century America, it was assumed that woman patients would be treated by male doctors. The idea of a "woman doctor" was deemed by many to lie somewhere between unfathomable and repugnant. Then along came Susan Dimock. A young North Carolinian who dreamed of becoming a physician, and grew up to practice medicine in Boston in the 1870s. Dimock was, at the time, arguably the best-educated, most-skilled woman surgeon in the nation.
Dimock's life reads like an adventure story, from recoiling at slave auctions and witnessing Civil War battles to escaping her fire-engulfed Southern hometown, then finding her place among Boston's most enterprising women. She studied medicine in Zurich and Vienna, hiked the Swiss Alps, executed complex surgeries, and trained America's first professional nurses, ultimately inspiring a new generation of female surgeons. Tragically, she died at the young age of 28 in the sinking of the ocean liner SS Schiller off England’s Scilly Isles.
February 6, 2024
Ornit Barkai’s film, "Laid to Rest: Buried Stories of the Jewish Sex Trade", is about themes of Jewish memory, culture and identity. It investigates the underreported story of the historic Jewish sex trade in Argentina between the 1890s and 1930s. Unfolding a taboo that was never laid to rest, the film gives voice to marginalized women and brings to life buried stories about a minoritized immigrant community that fought trafficking from within and prevailed. Through this film, Barkai brings to light complex issues of women’s rights, sex trafficking and community action, then and now.
A research associate and former scholar-in-residence at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute and Affiliated Scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University, Ornit Barkai is a documentary filmmaker whose areas of research cover gender, culture, identity, and memory.
This HBI event is proudly co-sponsored by the Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis University.
January 23, 2024
Organized by Yuri Doolan (Brandeis University) and moderated by Ji-Yeon Yuh (Northwestern University), this virtual session hosted speakers Kimberly McKee (Grand Valley State University), Christine Hong (UC Santa Cruz), and Jeong-Mi Park (Chungbuk National University). It engaged the experiences of three generations of women and children whose lives have been shaped by various forms of imperial violence originating on the Korean peninsula: (1) Japanese “comfort women,” (2) camptown sex workers for the U.S. military, and (3) transnational adoptees.