Events

Kelly O'Donnell - Colloquium

Kelly O’Donnell (HSHM) No String Attached: Selling and Using the Menstrual Cup in the 1970s. While American women eagerly adopted disposable napkins and tampons, the menstrual cup has remained an obscure alternative since the early twentieth century. In this paper, Kelly looks at the sale and use of the Tassaway cup in the 1970s to examine why women have, or have not, adopted this technology.

Briallen Hopper - Colloquium

Briallen Hopper (Yale Divinity School)  Demon Children & Tiger Mothers:  A History of Dystopic Domestic Memoir. This paper explores the anti-sentimental maternal voice from Shirley Jackson to Amy Chua, tracing the evolution of the self-avowed "bad mother" in American popular memoir and paying special attention to best-selling Gothic and Orientalist versions of monstrous maternity.

Elspeth Brown - Speaker Series

Elspeth H. Brown is an Associate Professor of History and the Director of the Centre for the Study of the United States and the American Studies Program, University of Toronto (http://www.utoronto.ca/csus/).  Her research focuses on U.S. social and cultural history from the Gilded Age through the 1980s.  Professor Brown’s work has focused on the rationalization of the body under advanced capitalism, with a specific interest in the historical relationship between visuality and...

Erinn Staley - Colloquium

Erinn Staley (Religious Studies) "All Are Welcome":  Feminist Ecclesiology and Intellectual Disability. This paper responds to the problem of church discrimination against people with intellectual disabilities.  Drawing on feminist liberation theologian Letty Russell, it advocates a theology of hospitality in which congregations seek the presence and full participation of people with disabilities, including recognizing them as practitioners--not only recipients--of welcome.

Carolee Klimchock - Colloquium

Carolee Klimchock (American Studies), Sex in the Stable: Naughty Women, Strapping Men, and Well-hung Horses. Liaisons between wealthy women and their hired coach drivers engrossed the public in the Gilded Age.  When heiresses ran off with working-class coachmen, things got ugly: disownment, commitments to asylums, and occasionally barroom brawls. Additionally, the performance of “sexual deviance” in the same arena as coaching culture carried a special shock value in the era.

more