Generic Template

The Feminist Theory Workshop: March 21-22, 2008 at Duke University

Videos of Presentations:

Ranjana Khanna

Elizabeth Wilson

Ratna Kapur

Toril Moi

Joan Copjec

Roundtable Discussion

READINGS
KEYNOTE LECTURES, SEMINAR LEADERS/ROUNDTABLE PARTICIPANTS
SCHEDULE
LOGISTICS
SPONSORS

A two day event featuring keynote lectures and working seminars

As an interdisciplinary field, Women's Studies has long been in critical conversation with a variety of disciplines, such that its languages of analysis, methodological priorities, and histories of research and writing are often recognizably situated in relation to the disciplinary identities of its practitioners. In recent years however, with the international growth of PhD programs, there has been much discussion and speculation about the extent to which Women's Studies has (or should have) its own post-disciplinary or transdisciplinary mode of inquiry. Posed as a question, the field asks itself: does Women's Studies have a distinctive tradition of inquiry of its own? The answer of course is nothing if not debatable, but the chief candidate for affirmation is the seemingly amorphormous entity, feminist theory . It is typically the name of the one course that students in every undergraduate and graduate curriculum are required to take, and it serves as an acknowledged critical domain for debates that cross both disciplinary and national lines.

We call our planned event for March 2008 a workshop to foreground our interest in feminist theory as a scholarly domain of inquiry. Therefore, in keeping with the interdisciplinary impulse central to Women's Studies as a field, we will resist consolidating feminist theory into a canon of great works or privileged authors, or prioritizing it as a specific kind of methodological project. The Workshop will be organized pedagogically to promote intense study, featuring both keynote lectures by internationally known scholars and small working seminars for participants.

SEMINAR READINGS
Seminar Leaders have been asked to suggest readings. Attendees are asked to access the Readings for the workshop they are registered for (they will attend the same seminar each day) in order to be able to effectively participate in these seminar discussions.

Joan Copjec - Seminar 2 (Sex as Difference):
1. Alain Badiou, "What Is Love?" in Sexuation: Sic 3, edited by Renata Salecl. Duke U. Press. 2000. pp. 263-281.
2. Monique David-Menard, "Sexual Alterity and the Alterity of the Real for Thought," published in the British journal, Angelakai, 8:2 (2003), pp. 137-149.

Ratna Kapur - Seminar 3:
1. Wendy Brown, "Feminism Unbound: Revolution, Mourning, Politics" pp. 98-115 (in Wendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics, Princeton: 2005)
2. Uma Narayan, Cross-Cultural Connections, Border Crossings and "Death by Culture": Thinking about Dowry-Murders in India and Domestic-Violence Murders in the United States, in Uma Narayan, Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third World Feminisms (Routledge, 1997) pp.83-117.
Optional:
3. Stewart Motha, "Veiled Women and the Affect of Religion in Democracy" Journal of Law and Society, 34(1): 2005, pp.139-162
4. Saba Mamood, "Agency, Gender and Embodiment" in Politics of Piety: the Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Princeton Univ. Press: 2005.

Wahneema Lubiano - Seminar 5:
1. M. Jacqui Alexander, "Erotic Autonomy as a Politics of Decolonization: An Anatomy of Feminist and State Practice in the Bahamas ," from Pedagogies of Crossing.
2. Hortense Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book," Diacritics 17.2 (Summer 1987): 64-81.

Toril Moi - Seminar 6:
1. Jacques Derrida, "Signature, Event, Context," in Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc. Northwestern University Press, 1988: pp. 1-23
2. Toril Moi. "Meaning What We Say: The 'Politics of Theory' and The Responsibility of Intellectuals", from The Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir, Clarendon Press, 2004
Optional:
3. "Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy." Must We Mean What We Say? By Stanley Cavell, Cambridge University Press, 2002: pp. 73-96; particularly pp. 86-96).
4. "Knowing and Acknowledging" Must We Mean What We Say? By Stanley Cavell, Cambridge University Press, 2002: pp. 238-266.

Kathryn Stockton - Seminar 7:
1. Kathryn Stockton, "Bottom Values: Anal Economics in the History of Black
Neighborhoods" from Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where "Black" Meets "Queer", Duke University Press: 2006.
2. Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? October AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism., Vol. 43, (Winter, 1987), pp. 197-222.

Kathi Weeks - Seminar 8:
1. Kathi Weeks, "Life Within and Against Work: Affective Labor, Feminist Critique, and Post-Fordist Politics,"Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization 7(1), 2007.
2. Wendy Brown, "At The Edge," Political Theory 30(4), August 2002.

Robyn Wiegman - Seminar 1:
1. Robyn Wiegman. Knowing What We Mean, a work-in-progress.
2. Robyn Wiegman. "Heternormativity and the Desire for Gender", Feminist Theory. volume 7(1): 89-103, 2006

Elizabeth Wilson - Seminar 4:
1. Elizabeth Wilson. "Gut Feminism", Differences, 2004
2. Elizabeth Wilson. "Somatic Compliance", introduction to Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body, Duke University Press, 2004

KEYNOTE LECTURES, SEMINAR LEADERS AND ROUNDTABLE PARTICIPANTS:

**Books by keynotes, seminar leaders and roundtable participants will be available for sale during the Workshop.

Joan Copjec (Keynote Speaker and Seminar Leader) is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director of the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture , SUNY The University of Buffalo). She is the author of two books: Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (MIT, 1994) and Imagine There's No Woman; Ethics and Sublimation (MIT, 2002). A former editor of the influential journal, October , she has also edited numerous books, including: October: The First Decade (MIT, 1987; with A. Michelson, R. Krauss, D. Crimp); Jacques Lacan's Television (Norton, 1990); Shades of Noir (Verso, 1993); Supposing the Subject (Verso, 1994); Radical Evil (Verso, 1996); and Giving Ground: The Politics of Propinquity (Verso, 1999, with M. Sorkin). Her primary fields of research are psychoanalysis, film and film theory, feminism, and art and architecture. She has taught intermittently at various schools of architecture: the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (NYC); Sci-Arc (LA); and the School of Architecture, Urban Design and Landscape Architecture at the City College (NYC).

Ratna Kapur (Keynote Speaker and Seminar Leader) is Director at the Centre for Feminist Legal Research in New Delhi. She has worked as a practising lawyer in India and been a visiting Professor at the National Law School of India; served as a visiting scholar at Cambridge and Harvard Universities; and was recently the Bertha Wilson Visiting Professor in Human Rights at Dalhousie Law School, Halifax, Canada. She has lectured and published extensively on issues of secularism, freedom of expression, equality and women's rights, including an edited collection entitled Feminist Terrains in Legal Domains: Interdisciplinary Essays on Women and Law, as well as co-authoring Subversive Sites: Feminist Engagements with Law (1996), and Secularism's Last Sigh?: Hinduvata and the (Mis)Rule of Law (1999). She is the author of Erotic Justice: Law and the New Politics of Polstcolonialism (Cavendish, 2005) and the forthcoming Alien Insurrections: Gender, Migration and Law (Routledge, 2008).

Ranjana Khanna, Margaret Taylor Smith Director of Women's Studies, Professor in the Department of English, and the Program in Literature at Duke University, where she focuses on literature and psychoanalytic, postcolonial and feminist theory. Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism was published by Duke University Press in 2003, and Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation 1830 to the Present will appear from Stanford University Press in 2007. Khanna is currently a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Her new project on Asylum: The Concept and the Practice, links one form of asylum's institutional setting (the mental asylum) to its most expansive version (the nation) in order to examine the complex relationship between sovereignty, institutions, living bodies, citizenship, and concepts of both the human and the valuable. She is the in-coming director of Women's Studies at Duke.

Wahneema Lubiano (Seminar Leader and Roundtable) is Associate Professor of African and African American Studies, Literature, and Women's Studies at Duke University. Before coming to Duke she taught at Princeton, the University of Texas at Austin, and Williams College. Her essays and articles have been published in a variety of interdisciplinary venues, including Social Text, Cultural Critique, boundary 2, American Literary History, Callaloo, and New England Quarterly. She is the editor of The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain (1996) and author of the forthcoming books, Messing With the Machine: Politics, Form and African-American Fiction and Like Being Mugged by a Metaphor: "Deep Cover" and Other "Black" Fictions. Her current research interests include African-American literature, African-American popular culture and film, feminist theory, and black intellectual history.

Toril Moi (Keynote Speaker and Seminar Leader) is James B. Duke Professor of Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University. She works on feminist theory and women's writing. She also works quite broadly on the intersections of literature, philosophy and aesthetics. She is particularly interested in finding ways of reading literature with philosophy and philosophy with literature without reducing the one to the other. Areas of special theoretical interest are psychoanalytic theory, French phenomenology (Sartre, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty), and ordinary language philosophy (Wittgenstein, Austin, Cavell). Her books include Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (1985; 2nd edition 2002), Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (1994); and What Is a Woman? And Other Essays (1999), republished in a shorter version as Sex, Gender and the Body (2005). She is the editor of The Kristeva Reader (1986), and of French Feminist Thought (1987). Her new book, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy, was published by Oxford University Press in September 2006.

Negar Mottahedeh (Moderator) is Assistant Professor in Literature and Women's Studies. She is author of Representing the Unpresentable: Images of Reform from the Qajars to the Islamic Republic of Iran (Syracuse University Press, 2007). Her areas of research include literature, history, memoirs, theater, film gender studies and Iranian cultural studies. Her current research and writing focuses on emergent cinematic codes in contemporary film cultures.

Anna Parkinson (Roundtable) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research areas include: twentieth and twenty-first century literature and culture; psychoanalysis; feminist and queer theories; critical theory; film studies; minority literature and culture. Professor Parkinson received her Ph.D. from Cornell University.

Kathryn Stockton (Seminar Leader and Roundtable) is Professor of English at the University of Utah whose research focuses on 19th- and 20th-Century British Literature; 20th- and 21st- Century Queer Studies; African American Studies; American Literature and Culture; Feminist Theory; and Religion and Literature. Stockton is the author of Between their Lips, a book on feminist approaches to Victorian literature, and Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where "Black" Meets "Queer" (DUP, 2006), and she has essays or chapters in the following volumes: Feminism and Modernism (1994), Aesthetic Subjects (2003), The Material Queer (1996), Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction (1997), Other Sisterhoods: Literary Theory and U. S. Women of Color (1998), and Regarding Sedgwick: Essays on Queer Culture and Critical Theory 2002).

Kathi Weeks (Seminar Leader) is Associate Professor of Women's Studies at Duke University. Her research encompasses feminist and political theory, women and politics, poststructuralist theory, Marxist theory, and the history of political thought. In addition to numerous articles and reviews, she is the co-editor with Michael Hardt of The Jameson Reader (2000) and author of Constitutiing Feminist Subjects (Cornell, 1998) in which she focuses on contemporary feminist theory. She is currently working on a monograph, A Feminist Critique of Work about politics and the ethics of work.

Robyn Wiegman (Seminar Leader and Moderator) is Professor in Women's Studies and Literature at Duke University. She has taught at Syracuse, Indiana, and the University of California, Irvine, where she also directed the Women's Studies Program. Her publications include American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (1995), Who Can Speak: Identity and Critical Authority (1995), Feminism Beside Itself (1995), AIDS and the National Body (1997), The Futures of American Studies (2002), and Women's Studies on Its Own (2002). She is currently completing two book projects: Being in Time With Feminism, which focuses on the institutionalization of feminism in the U.S. academy; and Object Lessons: The U.S. Knowledge Politics of Identity, which pays attention to relations of identification and affect in the constitution of identity objects of study.

Ara Wilson (Moderator) is Associate Professor of Women's Studies and Cultural Anthropology and Director of the Program in the Study of Sexualities at Duke. Her research interests include sex and gender in globalization; transnational feminist theory and networks; ethnography and research design; Bangkok, urban Southeast Asia, and transnational zones. She is the author of The Intimate Economies of Bangkok: Tomboys, Tycoons, and Avon Ladies in the World City (University of California Press, 2004) which intellectually and evocatively links political economy to the textures of everyday life. Her current book project, Sexual Latitudes, considers the implication of globalization as a stage for sexual politics.

Elizabeth Wilson (Keynote Speaker and Seminar Leader) is a Professor in the Women's and Gender Studies Program in the School of English at the University of New South Wales in Australia. She is an ARC Australian Research Fellow. Her Ph.D. is in Psychology and her research interests are in the cognitive and neurological sciences, affect theory, psychoanalysis, and evolutionary theory. She has recently published a book on neuroscience: Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body (Duke University Press, 2004). She is currently working on two projects: one on affect and artificial intelligence, the other on feminism, the gut and depression. Australian Research Council Discovery-Projects Grant (2004-2009): The Embodiment of Melancholy: A Feminist Analysis of Depression. The University of New South Wales Faculty Research Grant (2007): Artificial Emotion: The Role of Affect in the Early Development of Artificial Intelligence.

Tomiko Yoda (Moderator) is Associate Professor, Asian and African Languages and Literature, Women's Studies and Literature at Duke Univesity. Yoda is currently conducting research that explores the paradoxical nature of gender relations in Japan, Yoda is especially interested in the role women play in contemporary Japanese consumer culture and in shedding light on gender roles and the resulting tensions in the Japanese workplace since the 1970s. She has published articles on the construction of Japanese literary history, gender and nationalism, and the role of feminist theory in the study of premodern Japanese literature. Her latest publications include: Japan After Japan: Social and Cultural Life From the Recessionary 90s to the Present, co-editor (Duke University Press, 2006) and Gender And National Literature: Heian Texts and Constructions of Japanese Modernity (Duke University, 2004).

SCHEDULE
Friday, March 21, 2008

REGISTRATION WILL BEGIN AT 1:00 PM AT THE SANFORD INSTITUTE

2:00 pm .......... Ranjana Khanna, Opening Remarks

2:45 ................ Elizabeth Wilson, Keynote, Underbelly: Notes on Feminism and Biology (Moderator: Robyn Wiegman)

4:15 ................ Break

4:30 ................ Seminar

6:00 ................ Dinner Buffet - Sanford Commons

7:30 ................ Ratna Kapur, Keynote (Moderator: Ara Wilson)

Saturday, March 22, 2008

10:00 am ........ Toril Moi, Keynote, "I am not a woman writer": About Women, Literature and Feminist Theory Today (Moderator: Tomiko Yoda)

11:30 .............. Seminar

12:45 pm ........ Lunch - Sanford Commons

2:00 ................ Joan Copjec, Keynote (Moderator: Negar Mottahedeh)

3:30 ................ Break

3:45 ................ Closing Roundtable (Wahneema Lubiano, Anna Parkinson, Kathryn Stockton, Ara Wilson)

5:30................ Workshop Ends

LOGISTICS:

Duke University Interactive Map

West Campus Map and Location of the Sanford Institute (printable)

A peek inside the Sanford Institute

Terry Sanford Institute Interactive Map

Terry Sanford Institute Directions and Parking

Additional University Parking Information (all lots will be open on Saturday)

If you are traveling from East Campus on Friday you can take Bus C-3 and get off at the 2nd stop on Towerview before the turn onto Science Drive. The schedule and a map of the route are available here.

Local Hotels (pdf)

Local Restaurants (Word)

Many thanks to our sponsors including the following Duke University Departments:

African and African-American Studies
Asian and African Languages and Literature
Biology Department
The Franklin Humanities Institute
Duke University Center for International Studies
History Department
The Center for Global Studies and the Humanities
Germanic Languages and Literature
International Affairs and Development

Institutional Co-Sponsors:

UC Davis
University of Iowa
Yale University
Emory University
Brown University
University of Michigan
Cornell University
University of Utah
San Francisco State University
Dartmouth College
The University of St. Thomas

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			The Feminist Theory Workshop: March 21-22, 2008 at Duke University


			Videos of Presentations: Ranjana Khanna Elizabeth Wilson Ratna Kapur Toril Moi Joan Copjec Roundtable Discussion READINGS KEYNOTE LECTURES, SEMINAR LEADERS/ROUNDTABLE PARTICIPANTS SCHEDULE LOGISTICS SPONSORS A two day event featuring keynote lectures and working seminars As an interdisciplinary field, Women's Studies has long been in critical conversation with a variety of disciplines, such that its languages of analysis, methodological priorities, and histories of research and writing are often recognizably situated in relation to the disciplinary identities of its practitioners. In recent years however, with the international growth of PhD programs, there has been much discussion and speculation about the extent to which Women's Studies has (or should have) its own post-disciplinary or transdisciplinary mode of inquiry. Posed as a question, the field asks itself: does Women's Studies have a distinctive tradition of inquiry of its own? The answer of course is nothing if not debatable, but the chief candidate for affirmation is the seemingly amorphormous entity, feminist theory . It is typically the name of the one course that students in every undergraduate and graduate curriculum are required to take, and it serves as an acknowledged critical domain for debates that cross both disciplinary and national lines. We call our planned event for March 2008 a workshop to foreground our interest in feminist theory as a scholarly domain of inquiry. Therefore, in keeping with the interdisciplinary impulse central to Women's Studies as a field, we will resist consolidating feminist theory into a canon of great works or privileged authors, or prioritizing it as a specific kind of methodological project. The Workshop will be organized pedagogically to promote intense study, featuring both keynote lectures by internationally known scholars and small working seminars for participants. SEMINAR READINGS Seminar Leaders have been asked to suggest readings. Attendees are asked to access the Readings for the workshop they are registered for (they will attend the same seminar each day) in order to be able to effectively participate in these seminar discussions. Joan Copjec - Seminar 2 (Sex as Difference): 1. Alain Badiou, "What Is Love?" in Sexuation: Sic 3, edited by Renata Salecl. Duke U. Press. 2000. pp. 263-281. 2. Monique David-Menard, "Sexual Alterity and the Alterity of the Real for Thought," published in the British journal, Angelakai, 8:2 (2003), pp. 137-149. Ratna Kapur - Seminar 3: 1. Wendy Brown, "Feminism Unbound: Revolution, Mourning, Politics" pp. 98-115 (in Wendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics, Princeton: 2005) 2. Uma Narayan, Cross-Cultural Connections, Border Crossings and "Death by Culture": Thinking about Dowry-Murders in India and Domestic-Violence Murders in the United States, in Uma Narayan, Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third World Feminisms (Routledge, 1997) pp.83-117. Optional: 3. Stewart Motha, "Veiled Women and the Affect of Religion in Democracy" Journal of Law and Society, 34(1): 2005, pp.139-162 4. Saba Mamood, "Agency, Gender and Embodiment" in Politics of Piety: the Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Princeton Univ. Press: 2005. Wahneema Lubiano - Seminar 5: 1. M. Jacqui Alexander, "Erotic Autonomy as a Politics of Decolonization: An Anatomy of Feminist and State Practice in the Bahamas ," from Pedagogies of Crossing. 2. Hortense Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book," Diacritics 17.2 (Summer 1987): 64-81. Toril Moi - Seminar 6: 1. Jacques Derrida, "Signature, Event, Context," in Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc. Northwestern University Press, 1988: pp. 1-23 2. Toril Moi. "Meaning What We Say: The 'Politics of Theory' and The Responsibility of Intellectuals", from The Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir, Clarendon Press, 2004 Optional: 3. "Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy." Must We Mean What We Say? By Stanley Cavell, Cambridge University Press, 2002: pp. 73-96; particularly pp. 86-96). 4. "Knowing and Acknowledging" Must We Mean What We Say? By Stanley Cavell, Cambridge University Press, 2002: pp. 238-266. Kathryn Stockton - Seminar 7: 1. Kathryn Stockton, "Bottom Values: Anal Economics in the History of Black Neighborhoods" from Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where "Black" Meets "Queer", Duke University Press: 2006. 2. Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? October AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism., Vol. 43, (Winter, 1987), pp. 197-222. Kathi Weeks - Seminar 8: 1. Kathi Weeks, "Life Within and Against Work: Affective Labor, Feminist Critique, and Post-Fordist Politics,"Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization 7(1), 2007. 2. Wendy Brown, "At The Edge," Political Theory 30(4), August 2002. Robyn Wiegman - Seminar 1: 1. Robyn Wiegman. Knowing What We Mean, a work-in-progress. 2. Robyn Wiegman. "Heternormativity and the Desire for Gender", Feminist Theory. volume 7(1): 89-103, 2006 Elizabeth Wilson - Seminar 4: 1. Elizabeth Wilson. "Gut Feminism", Differences, 2004 2. Elizabeth Wilson. "Somatic Compliance", introduction to Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body, Duke University Press, 2004 KEYNOTE LECTURES, SEMINAR LEADERS AND ROUNDTABLE PARTICIPANTS: Books by keynotes, seminar leaders and roundtable participants will be available for sale during the Workshop. Joan Copjec (Keynote Speaker and Seminar Leader)** is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director of the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture , SUNY The University of Buffalo). She is the author of two books: Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (MIT, 1994) and Imagine There's No Woman; Ethics and Sublimation (MIT, 2002). A former editor of the influential journal, October , she has also edited numerous books, including: October: The First Decade (MIT, 1987; with A. Michelson, R. Krauss, D. Crimp); Jacques Lacan's Television (Norton, 1990); Shades of Noir (Verso, 1993); Supposing the Subject (Verso, 1994); Radical Evil (Verso, 1996); and Giving Ground: The Politics of Propinquity (Verso, 1999, with M. Sorkin). Her primary fields of research are psychoanalysis, film and film theory, feminism, and art and architecture. She has taught intermittently at various schools of architecture: the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (NYC); Sci-Arc (LA); and the School of Architecture, Urban Design and Landscape Architecture at the City College (NYC). Ratna Kapur (Keynote Speaker and Seminar Leader) is Director at the Centre for Feminist Legal Research in New Delhi. She has worked as a practising lawyer in India and been a visiting Professor at the National Law School of India; served as a visiting scholar at Cambridge and Harvard Universities; and was recently the Bertha Wilson Visiting Professor in Human Rights at Dalhousie Law School, Halifax, Canada. She has lectured and published extensively on issues of secularism, freedom of expression, equality and women's rights, including an edited collection entitled Feminist Terrains in Legal Domains: Interdisciplinary Essays on Women and Law, as well as co-authoring Subversive Sites: Feminist Engagements with Law (1996), and Secularism's Last Sigh?: Hinduvata and the (Mis)Rule of Law (1999). She is the author of Erotic Justice: Law and the New Politics of Polstcolonialism (Cavendish, 2005) and the forthcoming Alien Insurrections: Gender, Migration and Law (Routledge, 2008). Ranjana Khanna, Margaret Taylor Smith Director of Women's Studies, Professor in the Department of English, and the Program in Literature at Duke University, where she focuses on literature and psychoanalytic, postcolonial and feminist theory. Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism was published by Duke University Press in 2003, and Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation 1830 to the Present will appear from Stanford University Press in 2007. Khanna is currently a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Her new project on Asylum: The Concept and the Practice, links one form of asylum's institutional setting (the mental asylum) to its most expansive version (the nation) in order to examine the complex relationship between sovereignty, institutions, living bodies, citizenship, and concepts of both the human and the valuable. She is the in-coming director of Women's Studies at Duke. Wahneema Lubiano (Seminar Leader and Roundtable) is Associate Professor of African and African American Studies, Literature, and Women's Studies at Duke University. Before coming to Duke she taught at Princeton, the University of Texas at Austin, and Williams College. Her essays and articles have been published in a variety of interdisciplinary venues, including Social Text, Cultural Critique, boundary 2, American Literary History, Callaloo, and New England Quarterly. She is the editor of The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain (1996) and author of the forthcoming books, Messing With the Machine: Politics, Form and African-American Fiction and Like Being Mugged by a Metaphor: "Deep Cover" and Other "Black" Fictions. Her current research interests include African-American literature, African-American popular culture and film, feminist theory, and black intellectual history. Toril Moi (Keynote Speaker and Seminar Leader) is James B. Duke Professor of Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University. She works on feminist theory and women's writing. She also works quite broadly on the intersections of literature, philosophy and aesthetics. She is particularly interested in finding ways of reading literature with philosophy and philosophy with literature without reducing the one to the other. Areas of special theoretical interest are psychoanalytic theory, French phenomenology (Sartre, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty), and ordinary language philosophy (Wittgenstein, Austin, Cavell). Her books include Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (1985; 2nd edition 2002), Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (1994); and What Is a Woman? And Other Essays (1999), republished in a shorter version as Sex, Gender and the Body (2005). She is the editor of The Kristeva Reader (1986), and of French Feminist Thought (1987). Her new book, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy, was published by Oxford University Press in September 2006. Negar Mottahedeh (Moderator) is Assistant Professor in Literature and Women's Studies. She is author of Representing the Unpresentable: Images of Reform from the Qajars to the Islamic Republic of Iran (Syracuse University Press, 2007). Her areas of research include literature, history, memoirs, theater, film gender studies and Iranian cultural studies. Her current research and writing focuses on emergent cinematic codes in contemporary film cultures. Anna Parkinson (Roundtable) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research areas include: twentieth and twenty-first century literature and culture; psychoanalysis; feminist and queer theories; critical theory; film studies; minority literature and culture. Professor Parkinson received her Ph.D. from Cornell University. Kathryn Stockton (Seminar Leader and Roundtable) is Professor of English at the University of Utah whose research focuses on 19th- and 20th-Century British Literature; 20th- and 21st- Century Queer Studies; African American Studies; American Literature and Culture; Feminist Theory; and Religion and Literature. Stockton is the author of Between their Lips, a book on feminist approaches to Victorian literature, and Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where "Black" Meets "Queer" (DUP, 2006), and she has essays or chapters in the following volumes: Feminism and Modernism (1994), Aesthetic Subjects (2003), The Material Queer (1996), Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction (1997), Other Sisterhoods: Literary Theory and U. S. Women of Color (1998), and Regarding Sedgwick: Essays on Queer Culture and Critical Theory 2002). Kathi Weeks (Seminar Leader) is Associate Professor of Women's Studies at Duke University. Her research encompasses feminist and political theory, women and politics, poststructuralist theory, Marxist theory, and the history of political thought. In addition to numerous articles and reviews, she is the co-editor with Michael Hardt of The Jameson Reader (2000) and author of Constitutiing Feminist Subjects (Cornell, 1998) in which she focuses on contemporary feminist theory. She is currently working on a monograph, A Feminist Critique of Work about politics and the ethics of work. Robyn Wiegman (Seminar Leader and Moderator) is Professor in Women's Studies and Literature at Duke University. She has taught at Syracuse, Indiana, and the University of California, Irvine, where she also directed the Women's Studies Program. Her publications include American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (1995), Who Can Speak: Identity and Critical Authority (1995), Feminism Beside Itself (1995), AIDS and the National Body (1997), The Futures of American Studies (2002), and Women's Studies on Its Own (2002). She is currently completing two book projects: Being in Time With Feminism, which focuses on the institutionalization of feminism in the U.S. academy; and Object Lessons: The U.S. Knowledge Politics of Identity, which pays attention to relations of identification and affect in the constitution of identity objects of study. Ara Wilson (Moderator) is Associate Professor of Women's Studies and Cultural Anthropology and Director of the Program in the Study of Sexualities at Duke. Her research interests include sex and gender in globalization; transnational feminist theory and networks; ethnography and research design; Bangkok, urban Southeast Asia, and transnational zones. She is the author of The Intimate Economies of Bangkok: Tomboys, Tycoons, and Avon Ladies in the World City (University of California Press, 2004) which intellectually and evocatively links political economy to the textures of everyday life. Her current book project, Sexual Latitudes, considers the implication of globalization as a stage for sexual politics. Elizabeth Wilson (Keynote Speaker and Seminar Leader) is a Professor in the Women's and Gender Studies Program in the School of English at the University of New South Wales in Australia. She is an ARC Australian Research Fellow. Her Ph.D. is in Psychology and her research interests are in the cognitive and neurological sciences, affect theory, psychoanalysis, and evolutionary theory. She has recently published a book on neuroscience: Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body (Duke University Press, 2004). She is currently working on two projects: one on affect and artificial intelligence, the other on feminism, the gut and depression. Australian Research Council Discovery-Projects Grant (2004-2009): The Embodiment of Melancholy: A Feminist Analysis of Depression. The University of New South Wales Faculty Research Grant (2007): Artificial Emotion: The Role of Affect in the Early Development of Artificial Intelligence. Tomiko Yoda (Moderator) is Associate Professor, Asian and African Languages and Literature, Women's Studies and Literature at Duke Univesity. Yoda is currently conducting research that explores the paradoxical nature of gender relations in Japan, Yoda is especially interested in the role women play in contemporary Japanese consumer culture and in shedding light on gender roles and the resulting tensions in the Japanese workplace since the 1970s. She has published articles on the construction of Japanese literary history, gender and nationalism, and the role of feminist theory in the study of premodern Japanese literature. Her latest publications include: Japan After Japan: Social and Cultural Life From the Recessionary 90s to the Present, co-editor (Duke University Press, 2006) and Gender And National Literature: Heian Texts and Constructions of Japanese Modernity (Duke University, 2004). SCHEDULE Friday, March 21, 2008 REGISTRATION WILL BEGIN AT 1:00 PM AT THE SANFORD INSTITUTE 2:00 pm .......... Ranjana Khanna, Opening Remarks 2:45 ................ Elizabeth Wilson, Keynote, Underbelly: Notes on Feminism and Biology (Moderator: Robyn Wiegman) 4:15 ................ Break 4:30 ................ Seminar 6:00 ................ Dinner Buffet - Sanford Commons 7:30 ................ Ratna Kapur, Keynote (Moderator: Ara Wilson) Saturday, March 22, 2008 10:00 am ........ Toril Moi, Keynote, "I am not a woman writer": About Women, Literature and Feminist Theory Today (Moderator: Tomiko Yoda) 11:30 .............. Seminar 12:45 pm ........ Lunch - Sanford Commons 2:00 ................ Joan Copjec, Keynote (Moderator: Negar Mottahedeh) 3:30 ................ Break 3:45 ................ Closing Roundtable (Wahneema Lubiano, Anna Parkinson, Kathryn Stockton, Ara Wilson) 5:30................ Workshop Ends LOGISTICS: Duke University Interactive Map West Campus Map and Location of the Sanford Institute (printable) A peek inside the Sanford Institute Terry Sanford Institute Interactive Map Terry Sanford Institute Directions and Parking Additional University Parking Information (all lots will be open on Saturday) If you are traveling from East Campus on Friday you can take Bus C-3 and get off at the 2nd stop on Towerview before the turn onto Science Drive. The schedule and a map of the route are available here. Local Hotels (pdf) Local Restaurants (Word) Many thanks to our sponsors including the following Duke University Departments: African and African-American Studies Asian and African Languages and Literature Biology Department The Franklin Humanities Institute Duke University Center for International Studies History Department The Center for Global Studies and the Humanities Germanic Languages and Literature International Affairs and Development Institutional Co-Sponsors: UC Davis University of Iowa Yale University Emory University Brown University University of Michigan Cornell University University of Utah San Francisco State University Dartmouth College The University of St. Thomas