Lorena Aguilera Santana
2018 Van Ek Awardee

Lorena Aguilera Santana, a double-major in women and gender studies and sociology, has been chosen as one of this year's Jacob Van Ek Scholars, awarded by the College of Arts and Sciences at CU 麻豆影院 for outstanding academic achievement and contributions to the university. The award was established in 1973 to honor Jacob Van Ek, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at CU 麻豆影院 from 1929 to 1959. Students must meet the GPA requirements and be nominated for this award by a faculty member at CU 麻豆影院.

Lorena was nominated for this award by Dr. Robert Buffington, professor of women and gender studies, and Sabrina Sideris, director of the INVST Community Studies Program. Having taught Lorena in several of his courses, Dr. Buffington related that "Lorena is a brilliant student and a lovely person鈥攐ne of the smartest and most personable undergraduates I have encountered in over 20 years of teaching." He also noted that "her articulate contributions to class discussion and thoughtful response papers indicated a sophisticated understanding of difficult texts, an excellent grasp of geopolitics, a well-developed cultural sensitivity, and a maturity with regard to provocative material that is remarkable in an undergraduate student."

In addition to her studies in women and gender studies and sociology, Lorena is active in the INVST Community Studies Program, a highly competitive and interdisciplinary program at CU, which integrates academics with community-based engagement opportunities. Through INVST, she has served Intercambio Uniting Communities, and this summer plans to learn first-hand about documentation, sanctuary cities, labor justice, and economic justice. Lorena is currently involved in the 麻豆影院 Coalition to Expand Voting Rights, a group that grew from the INVST community. She explains, "our goal is to expand voting rights in the City of 麻豆影院 to all residents regardless of citizenship status. We are focusing on understanding immigrants' experiences and needs in 麻豆影院, in order to create a strong coalition that can advocate for every resident's right to vote on the local policies that directly affect them." Sideris writes that "INVST is thrilled to have Lorena鈥檚 participation, as her insightful contributions and forward-thinking questions always compel her classmates to engage as fully as she does, and show her educators how eager Lorena is to put what she is learning to good use."

Lorena is currently working on an honors thesis, titled Community, Social Networks and Support: The Case of Mexican Migrant Women in 麻豆影院 County. "With this thesis," writes Lorena, "my hope is to illustrate the ways migrant women from Mexico perceive and experience support through their social networks. I highlight the importance of family ties, social institutions, and gender roles in the ways women understand and negotiate their positions in their communities. Given how the different intersections of identity shape immigration experiences and access to resources, I wanted to understand the way social networks influence the lived experiences of migrant women."

This past summer, Lorena volunteered with the "Caf茅 Mujer" program in her hometown of Michoac谩n, Mexico which provides forums for working women to have conversations on work and family issues in a supportive and empowering environment. Buffington writes that "layered on top of a demanding academic schedule, these volunteer activities demonstrate Lorena鈥檚 commitment to community-building and social justice outside the academy." As Buffington concludes, "if academic ability and bi-national community involvement weren鈥檛 enough, Lorena is a delightful person: enthusiastic, thoughtful, generous, compassionate, hard working and conscientious."

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Dr. Inderpal Grewal

We were honored to have Inderpal Grewal, professor and chair in the Program in Women鈥檚, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University, join us on Tuesday March 13^th to present the lecture 鈥淐ommodifying aerial visuality in neoliberal empire.鈥� Grewal is an influential feminist scholar who helped found the field of transnational feminist cultural studies, and the author of several books, most recently (Duke University Press, 2017).

Dr. Grewal鈥檚 talk examined Hari Kunzru鈥檚 short story 鈥溾�� to discuss how dystopian fiction written from a postcolonial and diasporic context imagines the production of inequality and labor in global capitalism. Kunzru鈥檚 concerns about drones consider gender, sexuality, race and eugenics as necessary elements of this new visuality, one that requires both the commodification of drones and the use of abjected labor to create commodities.

Grewal鈥檚 ongoing projects include essays on gender, violence and counterinsurgency in India, and a book project on masculinity and bureaucracy in postcolonial India.

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Women and the Cuban Insurrection:
How Gender Shaped
Castro's Victory
Lorraine Bayard de Volo
Cambridge University Press
February 2018

In her latest book Women and the Cuban Insurrection: How Gender Shaped Castro's Victory, Dr. Lorraine Bayard de Volo focuses on previously unexamined narratives of war, using gender as a category of analysis to describe both the historical place of women in war, and how gender plays into the tactics and cultural constructs of war.

Her research into Cuba began as part of a larger project comparing the gender, war, and peace processes across Latin America, which was partially funded by the National Science Foundation, the United States Institute of Peace, and the University of Kansas. She conducted fieldwork in Mexico, Nicaragua, Colombia and Cuba which included interviews, participant observation, and examination of archives. "As I turned to the Cuban materials," writes Bayard de Volo, "I became convinced that an in-depth case study of conflict and militarization in that country was necessary before I could develop an effective comparative analysis across cases."

In exploring women's contributions to war in Cuba, Bayard de Volo doesn't solely provide us with a women's history of war, but rather documents a fuller and more complete account of history, giving us new perspectives on both the "war of bullets" as well as the "war of ideas." She uncovers previously ignored histories of women involved in clandestine forces and guerrilla warfare as well as those in supporting roles on and off the battlefield, examining how each were important to the war effort, and in doing so "shatters the Cuban War story's mythology of an insurrection waged and won by bearded guerrillas alone."

Author and professor Cynthia Enloe writes of Bayard de Volo's book, "she has made me look afresh at women's revolutionary activism outside the mountains, at Castro's tactical gender equity, and at Che Guevara's commitment to militarized masculinity. Everyone interested in war, revolution and feminist research will have their eyes opened by this new book."

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Lucile Berkeley Buchanan

100 years ago, Lucile Berkeley Buchanan became the first African American woman to earn a degree at CU 麻豆影院 -- but she was not allowed to accept her diploma on stage with her classmates, and not included in the yearbook. Born in 1884 to former slaves Lavina and James Fenton Buchanan, Lucile earned her degree in German with a minor in English and became a teacher -- living to the age of 105, without ever receiving recognition of her academic achievements from CU 麻豆影院.

Buchanan's story has only been uncovered through the work of Dr. Polly McLean, who herself is the first black woman to earn tenure at CU, and the first black woman to serve as the head of an academic unit, as director of Women's Studies from 2003-2007. McLean's research into Buchanan's life began more than a decade ago, and the revelation quickly led to the formation of an endowed scholarship in Buchanan's name, and a birthday party for Lucile heralded the beginning of a successful fundraising campaign. To date, eight students have been awarded the Lucile Berkeley Buchanan Scholarship in Women and Gender Studies, for their demonstrated commitment toward social justice, with preference given to first-generation college students. Additionally, the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures has established the Lucile Berkeley Buchanan Undergraduate Essay Prize. The prize honors the fact that Buchanan was a German major, and it carries a $300 prize for the best paper originally written for a CU German class.

To both celebrate the life of Lucile Berkeley Buchanan, and recognize her place in CU's history, several events have been scheduled this semester, culminating in Buchanan's degree being officially recognized by Chancellor Phillip P. DiStefano, where Dr. Polly McLean will accept Buchanan's degree on stage at commencement this May. DiStefano called the recognition of Buchanan "an honor that is long overdue." McLean will also give the inaugural Lucile Berkeley Buchanan Lecture on April 4th at 6pm in Old Main Chapel, where she will preview her new book about Buchanan, , which will be released in May. Author and scholar Jeffrey B. Perry notes that "the outcome of McLean鈥檚 fascinating historical sleuthing rescues Lucile and her family from obscurity and is a wonderful example of history from below written from a Black feminist perspective."

Two additional events were given in Lucile's honor this semester. The first, "Afropuff Lederhosen: What Happens When You Take a Black Baby and Raise it to be German?" was presented by Vanessa Roberts, PhD candidate in Sociology, on February 20th in the British and Irish Studies Room. Roberts delivered a satirical academic lecture which offered a sharp, humorous, and theoretically-grounded exploration of the interplay between personal experience and social expectations of racialized identity. On March 15th, three scholars joined together to present the forum discussion "African Americans in Germany: European and African American Intellectual Exchanges in the 20th Century." The panelists discussed the historical trends that framed Buchanan's choice to major in German, and included Reiland Rabaka, professor and chair of the CU 麻豆影院 Department of Ethnic Studies; Beverly Weber, associate professor of Germanic studies and Jewish studies, undergraduate associate chair in Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures, and director of graduate studies in the Program in Jewish Studies; and Claire Oberon Garcia, professor of English at Colorado College.

James White, Interim Dean of Arts & Sciences, writes in his letter remembering Buchanan's 100th anniversary:

"These gestures are symbolic, but symbols matter. However meager and tardy, the university鈥檚 recognition is a kind of reparation. We remember Lucile Berkeley Buchanan not only to honor her life, but also to reflect on what we once did and what we could now learn."

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Dr. Kristie Soares

Soares explores issues of queerness in Caribbean and Latinx communities both through her research and work as a performance artist. Coming to us from the University of Massachusetts Amherst鈥檚 Spanish & Portuguese Program, Soares is no stranger to the CU 麻豆影院 campus, having earned an MA in comparative literature as well as the graduate certificate in women and gender studies before heading to the University of California, Santa Barbara to complete her PhD. "The graduate certificate gave me a broad background about the various types of feminisms," notes Soares. "In my research I look at four different nations across a period of over 100 years. The graduate certificate gave me the tools to understand how feminism changes and adapts to different times and places."

Soares鈥� work has been published in journals such as Frontiers, Letras Femeninas, Revista de Estudios Hisp谩nicos, Remezcla, and she contributed chapters in several books, including her latest 鈥淭he Cuban Missile Crisis of White Masculinity: Tito Bonito and the Burlesque Butt,鈥� forthcoming in The Routledge Companion to Gender, Sex and Pop Culture in Latin America. Her first sole-authored book, Salsa Epistemology: Embodied Playfulness as Cultural Resilience, which is currently under review, engages with salsa鈥攁 music and dance tradition鈥攖o show how embodied playfulness figures as an integral part of queer activism in the Spanish Caribbean diaspora.

This semester, Soares is teaching Gender, Sexuality and Popular Culture, which examines television, film, music, and print texts including I Love Lucy, All in the Family, Beyonce videos and West Side Story to analyze how popular culture both produces and is produced by the world around it. In the fall, she will be teaching both Women of Color in Activism, and a new course Latina/x Studies, which will draw from work produced by and about Latina/xs, and discusses the social and cultural construction of Latina/x race and ethnicity alongside gender and sexuality, nationalism, migration and citizenship. The class will look specifically at Latina/x literary production and theory, historiographical trends, Latina feminist theory, and Latina/x political organizing using readings from Gloria Anzald煤a, Cherr铆e Moraga, Carmelita Tropicana, Jos茅 Esteban Mu帽oz, and others.

Earlier this month, Soares presented the talk "Capitalism con Salsa: Money and Popular Culture in Pitbull's Miami" for an event sponsored by the Latin American Studies. Soares presents evidence of Spanish Caribbean music鈥檚 connection with capitalism, termed 鈥渃apitalism con salsa鈥�, which rejects the futurity of capitalist progress narratives that consistently posit the future as the site of consumer fulfillment. Soares investigates how Cuban-American rapper Pitbull accesses capitalism con salsa through his popular catch phrase 鈥渄ale鈥� 鈥� a Spanish language version of carpe diem. Through his philosophy of 鈥渄ale鈥� Pitbull playfully reorders the timeline of capitalism in his music and videos, in turn destabilizing progress narratives that damage Latinx subjects by displacing happiness in a distant, richer future.

Soares is also an active performance artist, invested in making political statements in and through the body. She encourages students to 鈥渢ry out鈥� intellectual concepts using their bodies, through decolonial pedagogies such as Spoken Word Poetry and Theatre of the Oppressed. She also facilitates performance poetry workshops in schools and juvenile detention facilities, and says "I鈥檓 looking forward to getting involved with the performance community in 麻豆影院 and Denver. This spring I鈥檒l be participating in the Higher Education Perspectives series run by Denver Center for the Performing Arts, which brings together professors to discuss provocative works by local Latinx playwrights.鈥�

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The Department of Women and Gender Studies is pleased to announce that Maisam Alomar will join our department faculty as an assistant professor in fall 2018. Alomar is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego.

Alomar's dissertation, "鈥楾o Be Seen Whole鈥�: The Racialization of Disability after World War II" examines cinema, law and medicine in and beyond the United States through the intersecting frameworks of critical ethnic studies, disability studies, and gender & sexuality studies in order to ask how ideologies of race and gender have interacted to construct disability as a social and scientific category since the mid-twentieth century. Her research has been supported by grants from the Black Studies Project and the Institute of Arts and Humanities at UCSD, and by the University of California Humanities Research Institute.

We look forward to welcoming Alomar into our vibrant WGST and affiliated faculty community.

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