Careful Worldmaking: A WGSS Symposium
The WGSS program invites its faculty, students, staff, and alums to join us for a two-day symposium to build community and to reflect on “careful worldmaking” as a frame through which to explore the history, present, and future of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at UR and beyond. All faculty, staff, students, alums, and friends of the program are welcome and encouraged to attend.
Lecture & Reception: “The Past, Present, and Futures of WGSS”
4:30-6 p.m. | Great Hall, Humanities Building
Ladelle McWhorter
Stephanie Bennett-Smith Chair of Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, Emerita
Ladelle McWhorter is Stephanie Bennett-Smith Chair Emerita at the University of Richmond, where she was a core member of the WGSS faculty for over two decades. She is the author of three books to date: Heidegger and the Earth (1992), Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Normalization (1999), and Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A Genealogy (2009). She is currently completing a book on the politics of personhood titled, Unbecoming Persons: The Rise and Demise of Modern Moral Selfhood.
Julietta Singh
Stephanie Bennett-Smith Chair of Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies
Professor of English
Interdisciplinary Program Coordinator, Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies
Julietta Singh is professor of English and Stephanie Bennett-Smith Chair of WGSS at the University of Richmond, where she also coordinates the WGSS Program. A creative writer, filmmaker, and academic, she is the author of The Breaks (2021), No Archive Will Restore You (2018), and Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements (2018). She is currently completing work, as writer and co-director with Chase Joynt, on an experimental documentary feature-film, The Nest.
“On the Tools and the House”
10 - 11:15 a.m. | Humanities Commons
Naisargi Davé
Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Toronto
Naisargi Davé is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics (2012), which was awarded the 2013 Ruth Benedict Prize by the Association for Queer Anthropology, as well as the newly published book Indifference: On the Praxis of Interspecies Being (2023). She is currently Martha LA McCain Faculty Fellow at the Queer and Trans Research Lab at the University of Toronto’s Bonham Centre, at work on a new book project entitled Murder: The Social Life of Violent Death in Queer India.
“On Coralations”
11:30 a.m. – 12:45 p.m. | Humanities Commons
Melody Jue
Associate Professor of English, University of California, Santa Barbara
Melody Jue is associate professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Wild Blue Media: Thinking through Seawater (2020), which won the Speculative Fictions and Cultures of Science book award. She is co-editor, with Rafico Ruiz, of Saturation (2021), is currently co-editing, with Zach Blass and Jennifer Rhee, Informatics of Domination.
Community-Building Lunch
12:45 – 1:45 p.m. | Humanities Commons
“On Beauty”
1:45 – 3 p.m. | Humanities Commons
Jennifer Christine Nash
Jean Fox O'Barr Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, Duke University
Jennifer Christine Nash is Jean Fox O’Barr Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University, where she now organizes the Duke Feminist Theory Workshop and the Black Feminist Theory Summer Institute. She is the author of three books to date — The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography (2014), Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality (2018), and Birthing Black Mothers (2022) — as well as How We Write Now: Living with Black Feminist Theory, published this coming August.
5 – 6:30 p.m.: Nathan Snaza Book Launch Celebration for Tendings: Feminist Esoterisms and the Abolition of Man
Please join us for an AFTERPARTY to celebrate the pre-publication of Humanities Coordinator Nathan Snaza’s Tendings: Feminist Esoterisms and the Abolition of Man (official published February 16). There will be a brief reading from the book followed by Q&A, plus food, drinks, and esoteric arts.
Nathan Snaza
Assistant Professor of English
Director, Humanities Center
Nathan Snaza is the founding director of the Humanities Center and assistant professor of English at the University of Richmond. He is the author of Animate Literacies: Literature, Affect, and the Politics of Humanism (2019) and Tendings: Feminist Esoterisms and the Abolition of Man (forthcoming, February 2024). He is also co-editor of Posthumanism and Educational Research (2014) and Pedagogical Matters: New Materialisms and Curriculum Studies (2016).