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DEPARTMENT OF SEXUALITY, WOMEN’S AND GENDER STUDIES FALL 2016 DEPARTMENT OF SEXUALITY, WOMEN’S AND GENDER STUDIES institution. More than that, though, she was a kind, Comings and Goings ever-thoughtful, beloved member of our community, filled with humaneness and strength. She will be deeply Visiting Assistant Professor Kimberly Juani- m i s s e d .” ta Brown of Mount Holyoke College will be teaching The full article can be read here: https://www. her course Self, Subject, and Photography through the amherst.edu/news/memoriam/node/583975 SWAGS Department for the Fall 2016 semester. New Course Offerings (2016-2017) Visiting Lecturer Maryam Kamali will be join- ing the SWAGS Department for the Spring 2017 semes- ter to teach Women in the Islamic Middle East. FALL 2016 SWAG 331 | The Postcolonial Novel: Gender, Race Stephanie Orion joined the and Empire SWAGS Department in August 2014 as the new Academic Department What is the novel? How do we know when a work of Coordinator. Then a little over a literature qualifies as a novel? In this course we will year later her daughter, Sylvana, study the postcolonial novel which explodes the cer- was born; the SWAGS Department’s tainties of the European novel. Written in the aftermath youngest member! of empire, these novels question race, class, gender and empire in their subject matter and narrative form. We Congratulations to Sahar Sadjadi and Khary will consider fiction from South Asia, the Caribbean Polk for being granted reappointment. Both will be on and sub-Saharan Africa. Novels include South Afri- sabbatical for the 2016-2017 academic year. can writer J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Caribbean Rose Olver passed away novelist Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here. in November 2014. During her Taught by Assistant Professor Shandilya 50 years at Amherst College, she pioneered the way for SWAG 375 | Self, Subject, Photography female faculty and students, Before the oft-reproduced social-media from mentoring many women mechanism of the selfie, there existed (and still does) who would go on to become the artistic self-portrait. Utilized in the photographic professors, to chairing numerous realm to create a representation of the artist as both committees, including the ones subject and object, self-portraits can be whimsical, that guided Amherst’s transition grim, tantalizing, performative, or combative. In this to coeducation and created the course we will examine gendered constructions of self- Women’s and Gender Studies Department (now the portraiture photography existing in the contemporary Sexuality, Women’s and Gender Studies Department). realm. Specifically, our task will be to examine the “Rose was a tremendous presence on campus for registers of possibility present when women use their decades,” said Amherst President Biddy Martin. own bodies to claim visual space. Our goal during the “In her time at the College, she not only established semester will be to think through all of the mechanisms herself as a superb teacher and nationally renowned of the self that are deployed in the context of scholar, but also fought for and helped to enact for our photographic practice. Some of the photographers we women colleagues changes that made Amherst a better will examine include Carrie Mae Weems, Renee Cox, SEXUALITY IN ITS CONTEXT DEPARTMENT OF SEXUALITY, WOMEN’S AND GENDER STUDIES Francesca Woodman, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Faculty News Joy Gregory, Ana Mendieta, Miru Kim, Cindy Sherman, Nikki S. Lee, and Stacey Tyrell. Students will produce their own self-portraits, and write an analytical paper Martha Saxton on a contemporary self-portraiture photographer. Taught by Visiting Assistant Professor Brown Recently, students from Professor Wendy Ewald’s and Professor Martha Saxton’s First Year SPRING 2017 Seminar, Representing Equality, came together with well-wishers from the faculty to celebrate the launch of SWAG 363 | Women in the Islamic Middle East the book. In the fall semester of 2015, students wrote What is the role of women in the Islamic Middle and made photographs for A Sex East? What factors determine the changing roles of and Education Handbook to help women in the Islamic Middle East? This course offers incoming First Years understand an introduction to the status and roles of Muslim where to get help in case of a women of the Middle East, including the Arab World, sexual assault, but more broadly to North Africa, Turkey, and Iran, from the pre-Islamic understand their College, its social era to the modern period. Given the complexities of life and the background to it, its exhilarating diversity as the relationship between men and women, the readings well as its unrealized promises. explore key ideas about women that were developed Martha Saxton retired on July first, so this was by major male scholars, including Ulama (clergymen) her last First Year Seminar. She said, “I am particularly and intellectuals. By focussing on women’s activist proud of the students’ handbook as it demonstrates that movements throughout history, this course examines as Amherst faculty try to provide excellent and inclusive the social changes brought about by Muslim and non- education, our greatest resource is our multitalented Muslim women who claimed their rights within their student body.” family and in society and politics. Another recent highlight was We will apply an interdisciplinary approach the launch of Wendy Ewald, Fazal in order to incorporate concepts from different fields, Sheik, and Martha Saxton’s book, The mainly history, literature, and art. We will use lectures, Transformation of this World Depends media representations, and discussions to progress upon You. Combining interviews from the pre-Islamic era to the present, with a special with members of the communities emphasis on changes in women’s roles as individuals surrounding Amherst as well as and as members of society. archival material about Amherst Taught by Visiting Lecturer Kamali missionaries, they wrote of the College’s founding purpose to bring light to the world, as well as SWAG 468 | Willa Cather the overreach, flaws, but also successes of that goal, past This seminar will read Willa Cather’s short and present. fiction, essays, and novels with an eye to the role After retirement, she will be finishing a long- sexuality plays in her literary production. This course, deferred book on Mary Ball Washington, the unfairly aimed at Juniors and Seniors, is attentive to writing and caricatured mother of George Washington. She also speaking: there will be three short papers, as well as a hopes to be teaching at Columbia University. Martha longer research project that will be the subject of a class Saxton said, “None of this will replace my profound presentation. gratitude and affection for my SWAGS colleagues and Taught by Professor Barale students over the last 20 years.” SEXUALITY IN ITS CONTEXT DEPARTMENT OF SEXUALITY, WOMEN’S AND GENDER STUDIES More Faculty News tion, and state governments, and by opposition states, parties, and movements. This study accords particular importance to the role of social movements in precipi- Michele Barale tating anti-minority violence. It calls for a broader un- derstanding of social movements and greater appre- Professor Barale has begun work on the next ciation of party-movement relations. phase of her study of Willa Cather and photography. She attended book signings in November and She is now looking at the candid (vernacular is the cur- December 2015 at Amherst Books and Amherst Col- rent term) photos of Cather - of which there are a whole lege’s Frost Library. There was a symposium on her lot. God Bless the Kodak brownie camera! book at New York University at which she served as Professor Barale spent a commentator (February 2016). She also gave a talk 10 very useful days in London about her book at Univeristy of Michigan (March at the British Library. While it 2016). may seem odd to research an Another recent publication is Professor American author in a British Li- Basu’s chapter “Women, Dynasties and Democra- brary, Cather spent a great deal cies in India” which appears in the newly released of time in Europe, and Profes- book Democratic Dynasties: State, Party and Fam- sor Barale is interested in look- ily in Contemporary Indian Politics (Editor: Kanchan ing at newspapers and periodi- Chandra, Cambridge University Press, April 2016). British Library cals that Cather had available to her. If you stand still long enough, Professor Barale can Aneeka Henderson tell you all about it! Amrita Basu Professor Henderson recently published a chapter “The Rebirth of Queer: Exile, Kinship, and Metamorphosis in Dee Rees’s Pariah” in the book Professor Basu’s book Violent Conjunctures in African American Culture and Society After Rodney Democratic India (Cambridge Uni- King: Provocations and Protests, Progression and ‘Post- versity Press, July 2015) was recently racialism’ (Editors: Jo Metcalf and Carina Spaulding, released. This book is a pioneering Ashgate, July 2015). She also wrote book reviews of study of when and why Hindu na- The Other Blacklist: The African tionalists have engaged wwin dis- American Literary and Cultural crimination and violence against Left of the 1950s (Columbia UP, minorities in contemporary India. 2014), by Mary Helen Washing- Amrita Basu asks why the incidence ton and Sojourning for Freedom: and severity of violence differs Black Women, American Commu- significantly across Indian states, nism, and the Making of Black Left within states, and through time. Contrary to many pre- Feminism (Duke UP, 2011) by dictions, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party Erik McDuffie both appearing in (BJP) has neither consistently engaged in anti-minority Women’s Studies Quarterly. violence nor become a centrist party but has alternated Professor Henderson was invited to give sev- between moderation and militancy.

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