Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women

The Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women is grateful to accept the National Council for Research on Women's Lifetime Achievement Award. Receiving the award this evening is especially meaningful as we celebrated our thirtieth anniversary this academic year.  I would like to thank the Center’s former directors – Joan Wallach Scott, Karen Newman, Ellen Rooney, and Elizabeth Weed – for helping build such a strong foundation for our work.

The Center’s transnational research agenda examines the circulation of bodies and markets, technologies, and transnational labor. Our research framing is not solely on gender but additionally on difference – such as race, ethnicity, class, language, citizenship, and so forth. The Center’s research informs many of the policy debates that surround issues of gender equity, reproductive rights, human rights, education, work, and violence. Our focus is both theoretical and practical, concerned with real world issues and important choices faced by those who seek to reform existing social institutions and create new ones.

Since our founding, we have awarded 91 postdoctoral fellowships, providing critical support to young scholars who spend a year at the Pembroke Center where they work with other scholars from a variety of disciplines. By supporting these scholars, the Pembroke Center plays a crucial role in developing the careers of outstanding feminist scholars, many of whom go on to hold senior leadership positions at universities in the United States and around the world.  Our investment in transnational research includes the Center’s ongoing “Nanjing-Brown Joint Program in Gender Studies and the Humanities,” which meets in China and the U.S.

The Pembroke Center’s teaching program – including our Gender and Sexuality Studies concentration – has trained hundreds of undergraduates, women and men, in a wide variety of fields who pursue their own work and activism with a gendered perspective.  They are capable of offering insightful social critiques so that wider publics become aware of the inequalities faced by women and girls and are moved to action.

The Pembroke Center’s Feminist Theory Archives preserve the work of scholars who have transformed their disciplines and the landscape of universities around the world. To date, over a hundred of the world’s leading feminist scholars have pledged their personal papers and research materials. This growing collection offers unique perspectives on the risk taking work that brought feminism to the vanguard of academic research and challenged entrenched thinking starting in the late 1960s.  An impressive legacy of wider debates and  path-breaking projects  continues today.

Looking forward, next year we will be offering seed grants for Brown faculty who wish to create novel research groups from different disciplines to explore transnational issues of common concern.  We will be supporting innovate combinations of researchers from the humanities, social sciences, creative arts, health sciences, and science and technology studies, and we look forward to sharing the fruits of this new collaborative research with groups throughout the NCRW network.

The Pembroke Center is building new bridges between higher education and the world of policy making and implementation on a range of issues.  We have the privilege and pleasure of educating many talented young adults so they can think for themselves and analyze major social issues in productive ways.  Brown is a university with need blind admissions and great diversity in its student body.   Our students learn by working on research projects in the U.S. and all over the world.  These students represent new generations of potential collaborators for activist groups, NGOs, the professions, and the government -- working on issues nuanced by gender, diversity, and global perspectives.   

The Center has benefitted from excellent leadership at Brown.  After eleven wondrous years with Ruth Simmons at the helm, we are now welcoming another woman leader, public health economist Christina Paxson, as our new president.

Thank you so much for this wonderful award. 

Anthropologist Kay Warren Appointed Director of the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women

The Pembroke Center, celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2011, is expanding its support of path-breaking research that spans the humanities, social sciences, and creative arts.

Anthropologist Kay Warren, the Charles C. Tillinghast Jr. ’32 Professor of International Studies and professor of anthropology, has been appointed director of the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women.

“Since its inception in 1981, the Pembroke Center has played a crucial role in advancing research and teaching on gender, and more generally on the notion of difference,” said Rajiv Vohra, dean of the faculty. “The center has been developing a richly international and cross-cultural research perspective. Professor Warren’s interests make her ideally suited to provide leadership as the Pembroke director.”

Warren, a cultural anthropologist, joined the Brown faculty in 2003 as professor of anthropology and international studies, based at the Watson Institute. She directed the Watson’s Politics, Culture, and Identity Program and pursued her own research interests in culture, violence, and peace processes; international law and human trafficking; and gender and politics. In 2009-10 she directed a year-long Pembroke seminar titled “Markets and Bodies in Transnational Perspective.”

“The Pembroke Center has long been interested in critical theory and representations of difference — the histories of these constructions, the power of media and artistic expressions, and the ways difference becomes a political and social tool,” Warren said. “The Pembroke Center’s growing attention to transnational issues and the benefits and risks of change build on the Center’s longstanding intellectual engagement with issues of difference.”

Under Warren’s directorship, the Pembroke Center’s research programs will continue to pursue the ironies and complexities of the emergence of new social media, the arts and humanities as sites of cultural critique, the circulation of new health technologies, and hostile responses to international labor migration. The Center’s approach will continue to be intensely interdisciplinary and global in scope.

“I think the range of what people can do at the Pembroke Center is only limited by people’s imaginations,” Warren said. “Our agenda is very open-ended, given the diversity and talents of the faculty — from the humanities, social sciences, creative arts, and life sciences – who work with us. This collaborative environment expands the concerns that people can bring to the Center, and we welcome new involvement from faculty and students.”

Warren is on sabbatical for the 2010-11 year, completing work on her next book, Human Trafficking, Transnationalism, and the Law. Although she will remain involved in planning and fundraising for the Pembroke Center, Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, associate professor of comparative literature and Italian studies, will oversee day-to-day operations as acting director while Warren is on leave.