Yearly Themes

The WGSS program gathered on January 25-26, 2024 for an evening and a day to consider what “careful worldmaking” means in the fields of women, gender, and sexuality studies, and specifically what it means, or might mean, at the University of Richmond. The symposium invited consideration of how our histories and our dreams for feminist, queer, and decolonial futures inform our everyday practices together on campus, and in our lives beyond.

The Symposium included presentations by former Stephanie Bennett-Smith Chair Ladelle McWhorter, and newly appointed Chair Julietta Singh, as well as special guests Naisargi Davé (University of Toronto), Melody Jue (University of California- Santa Barbara), and Jennifer Christine Nash (Duke University).

This four-day multisensory event (February 6-9, 2024) co-sponsored by the Department of English Writers Series, explored at the relationship between attention, poetics, and love through a cluster of readings, performances, conversations, interventions, and workshops. Featured guests included Chris Martin, author of May Tomorrow Be Awake: On Poetry, Autism, and Our Neurodivergent Future and four volumes of poetry; Adam Wolfond, a nonspeaking autistic poet, who is the author of two chapbooks and was the youngest poet ever to appear in the American Academy of Poets “poem-a-day” series; Wolfond’s mother, Estée Klar, a visual artist and academic; and JJJJJJerome Ellis, whose work moves across sound, ritual, visualties, and printed words and whose book, Aster of Ceremonies, is forthcoming. Ellis also participated in Jeremy Drummond’s “Frames of Reference” series.

In spring 2024, students in four classes–in Dance, American Studies, VMAP, and Rhetoric and Communications–spent the semester investigating the ways they can stage histories, both personal and public, with a special focus on the Lost Cause and the University of Richmond’s relationship to its Confederate past. Our students presented their dance performances, Story Maps, and sculptures in response to their semester-long immersion–through museum visits, documentary film screenings, and guest speakers–in current struggles to reframe mistold histories. These projects were presented first at the Valentine Museum and then on April 24 in the Modlin Center for the Arts.

The Recovery and Repair theme included a Zoom conversation between renowned literary critics Toril Moi and Rita Felski entitled “The Uses of Experience.” Then,i n the newly opened Humanities Commons, Kandice Chuh delivered the first talk, “Teaching Relations, Teaching Asian America, Rehearsing (for) Life” (March 2022) followed in April by “Life. Writing,” a conversation between Professor Emertia Daryl Cumber Dance and WGSS Professor Julietta Singh. Throughout the semester, Ashon Crawley (UVA) visited the Humanities Fellows Seminar, delivered the public talk, “loss.nothing.memorial: sounds of the dead but not departed” on April 19. His multimedia art exhibition, also called “loss.nothing.memorial.” graced the Humanities Commons throughout the 2022-23 academic year. 

The 2019-2020 lecture series “Unsettling Ecologies” was a collaboration between the English Department Lecture Series, the Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies program, and the Environmental Studies program, and is meant to spark conversation across campus about climate change. Featured guests included Dana Luciano (Rutgers University), Neel Ahuja (UC- Santa Cruz), and Kai Bosworth (VCU).