• Tuesday, Feb. 28: “I want you to know:” Tillie’s Olsen’s Proletarian Prose and Poetry. Galanti Lounge, URI Library, 5 to 7 p.m.
Karen Stein, director of the Women’s Studies program and professor of English and Women’s Studies earned her bachelor’s degree from Brooklyn College, her master’s degree from Pennsylvania State University and her doctorate from the University of Connecticut. A co-founder of Women’s Studies Program at URI, she has written and spoken about women as writers and subjects of literature. Her current research interests include Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, American women poets, utopian fiction by women, and women and science. Her recent book Margaret Atwood Revisited focuses on the Canadian novelist, critic and poet.
• Tuesday, March 21: A Hymn for the Ladies: The Female Poet of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. URI Women’s Center, Dana Shugar Library, 5 to 6:30 p.m.
Ann Suter, professor of languages, earned her doctorate from Princeton in classical philology with a specialty in Homeric studies. She is the author of numerous articles on Homer’s Iliad and the book The Narcissus and the Pomegranate: an Archaeology of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. Suter’s talk will reflect further work on the hymn, and suggest that, contrary to the usual assumption, it was composed by a woman. Suter has also written a libretto for an opera on the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, based on the interpretation in her book. It will be performed in a concert version with music by URI Professor Emeritus Geoffrey Gibbs at the Providence Athenaeum on April 5.
• Tuesday, April 11: Transracial Feminist Alliances: Connecting Through Difference. URI Women’s Center, Dana Shugar Library, 5 to 6:30 p.m.
Julia R. Johnson holds a joint appointment in communication studies and women’s studies. Currently, she serves as director of graduate instructors and basic courses for the Department of Communication Studies. The primary emphasis in her teaching and research are critical approaches to the study of communication and culture, including the study of transracial feminist alliances, intercultural communication, performance studies, rhetoric and critical pedagogy. Her recent publications appear in Communication Education, The American Communication Journal and Equity and Excellence in Education.
• Tuesday, April 18: HIV, AIDS, and Women. URI Women’s Center, Dana Shugar Library, 5 to 6:30 p.m.
Kendall Moore is on the faculties of journalism and film-media studies. Prior to academia, she worked in television and film production for 15 years. She has worked as a field producer with ABC News/Discovery Health, the Discovery Channel; producer and national project coordinator with PBS, P.O.V.; and as a medical reporter for Reuters. In 2001, she spent a year on a Fulbright Scholarship to the University of Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania. There, she taught nonfiction/fiction writing and television production in addition to producing educational television programs on the AIDS epidemic. In 2004, she received a Fulbright Specialist Grant to teach journalism at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica and to research the issue of representation, gender and HIV/AIDS. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Syracuse University and a master’s degree in media studies from The New School for Social Research. She has also been the recipient of a Poynter Teaching Fellowship at Indiana University.