Brown Women Speak
Brown Women Speak presents oral histories of Brown alumnae. Brown University first admitted women students in 1891. The founders of the Women's College in Brown University went on to raise money to build Pembroke Hall, dedicated in 1897, to provide the college with a permanent home. The Women's College was renamed Pembroke College in 1928.
Pembroke College merged with the men's college and Brown University became fully coeducational in 1971. The Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women was founded in 1981. In 1982, the Center began collecting oral histories of Brown alumnae. This project was led by Barbara Anton, who served as director of Alumnae Affairs for many years.
The digitization of these interviews has been sponsored by the Pembroke Center Associates, a group of alumnae and friends that supports the Pembroke Center. Photographs and other documents have been scanned from Brun Mael and Liber Brunensis, the Pembroke and Brown yearbooks; from the Pembroke Record and the Brown Daily Herald; and from the University Archives held at the John Hay Library. We invite you to explore the oral histories, photos, and related materials.
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Advancing Innovative Research
The Pembroke Center's interdisciplinary research programs, curriculum, publications, lectures, and public events advance scholarship across the humanities and social sciences. Our richly international and cross-cultural research programs explore issues involving women's lives on the global stage.
Teaching Students
The Center is home to Brown University's Gender and Sexuality Studies program, which examines the construction of gender and sexuality in social, cultural, political, economic, and scientific contexts.
Research Initiative
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2012-13 Pembroke Seminar: Economies of Perception
What are the economic dimensions of perception? Does it make sense to speak of the “distribution” of perception? Is perception anything other than a given of human social existence? Across the disciplines, contemporary thinkers and scholars are paying renewed attention to perception, in particular, to the economic and political conditions of perception, to the inequalities that are implicit within the category, and to the possibility of forging modes of critical engagement that do not depend upon or reiterate perceptual structures. Recent work on affect and the emotions, on new technologies, on contemporary aesthetics, on the neurosciences, and on the ethics and politics of alterity has found itself increasingly alert to the processes of organization, distribution and individuation that are occluded in any straightforward understanding of subjective perception.
In 2012-13 the Pembroke seminar will explore as many aspects of a differentiated approach to the economies of perception as possible. Questions to be addressed include the following: Can the feminist critique of vision and visuality, and of the implication of a centered, universal subject, be generalized to perception as such? How dependent is the concept of representation on an unreflective understanding of perception? Does a more complex theory of perception require us to dispense with representation entirely? To what extent are challenges to representation explicable as attempts to establish art and literature on grounds other than perception? What forms of dialogue are taking place between current scientific approaches to perception and older philosophical ones, such as Merleau-Ponty’s insistence on the “embodied” quality of all perception, or Bergson’s category of “universal” or “pure” perception? Are there any grounds for discarding what seem to be the very conditions of human social being – the apparatus of self and other –in a new orientation towards or understanding of perception? What are the implications of any such reorientation for political and subjective agency?
Chinese Women’s Documentaries in the Market Era
Film Festival and Symposium
Film Festival
March 17-18, 2012
Cable Car Cinema
204 South Main Street, Providence
Symposium
March 21, 2012, 9:00 am – 5:00 pm
Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute
111 Thayer Street, Providence
Chinese Women’s Documentaries in the Market Era will screen and examine important documentary films by Chinese Women directors from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland China. The symposium will feature directors and international scholars who will discuss the role and significance of women’s documentary films in articulating different human concerns, critical visions, and visual aesthetics in the rapidly changing Greater China area. Directors confirmed to attend include:
Ho Chao-ti (My Fancy High Heels, 2010)
Tammy Cheung (Election, 2008)
Lee Ching-hui (Money and Honey, 2011)
Shi Tou (Women 50 Minutes, 2006)
Miao Wang (Beijing Taxi, 2010)
Feng Yan (Bing Ai, 2007)
These Chinese women directors have made some of the most important and influential documentaries of the past decade on issues relating to the female self, sexuality, social migrations and transformations, and history. The symposium will explore these and other issues. Scholars to present include:
Hongwei Bao, Assistant Professor, Nottingham Trent University
Sylvia Lin, Associate Professor of Literature, University of Notre Dame
Tze-lan Sang, Associate Professor of Chinese Literature, University of Oregon
Qin Shao, Professor of History, The College of New Jersey
Louisa Wei Shiyou, Associate Professor, School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong
Lu Xinyu, Professor of Journalism, Fudan University
Films to be screened include:
About Love, 2012 (directed by Tammy Cheung)
Beijing Taxi, 2010 (directed by Miao Wang)
Bing Ai, 2007 (directed by Feng Yan)
My Fancy High Heels, 2010 (directed by Ho Chao-ti)
Money and Honey, 2011 (directed by Lee Ching-hui)
Women 50 Minutes, 2006 (directed by Shi Tou)
