Women's Studies Research Center

December 10, 2024

WSRC Scholar Donna Dodson is participating in "The Circe Effect: Women’s Creative Power Reclaims the Narrative", an exhibition featuring the work of Madeleine Conover, Katiushka Melo, Dana Robinson, Chelsea Steinberg Gay and Donna Dodson, from Nov. 14, 2024 to Jan. 25, 2025 at the Hotchkiss School's Tremaine Art Gallery.

Curated by Sarah Anderson Lock P’24, The Circe Effect was first presented in February 2024 at The Gallery at The Visual and Performing Arts Center, Western Connecticut State University, Danbury, CT as part of their NEA Big Read project. The exhibition is traveling to Lakeville as part of programming for the 50th anniversary celebration of including women and girls at Hotchkiss.

The exhibit is inspired by themes explored in the best-selling novel Circe by Madeline Miller. The narrator is Circe herself, goddess and sorceress from the ancient Greek epic “The Odyssey” who was banished by the Gods to live in isolation on the isle of Aiaia. The New York Times called the novel “A bold and subversive retelling of the goddess’ story … recasting the most infamous female figure from The Odyssey as a hero in her own right.”

The Western cultural imagination has habitually presented Circe one-dimensionally as a dangerous, seductive witch, known for casting a spell that turned Odysseus’s crew of sailors into swine. In Miller’s novel, Circe takes ownership of her story and tells it on her own terms, releasing herself from these narrow constraints.

Miller’s methodology has struck a cultural chord by addressing the familiar feminist principles of women’s power and agency: when women orchestrate the narrative, stereotypes are challenged and recast. The artists gathered for The Circe Effect address these issues from their own points of view and experiences. The exhibit includes works in sculpture, painting, photography, performance, installation, printmaking, and drawing

The University of Chicago Press has nominated Margaret Gullette's book "American Eldercide: How It Happened, How to Prevent It" for a Pulitzer in nonfiction and the National Book Award.

Margaret Morganroth Gullette is a cultural critic and anti-ageism pioneer whose prize-winning work is foundational in critical age studies. She is the author of several books, including "Agewise," "Aged by Culture," and "Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People." Her writing has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, Atlantic, Nation, and the Boston Globe.

Twenty percent of the Americans who have died of COVID since 2020 have been older and disabled adults residing in nursing homes—even though they make up fewer than one percent of the US population. Something about this catastrophic loss of life in government-monitored facilities has never added up.

Until now. In "American Eldercide," Margaret Morganroth Gullette investigates this tragic public health crisis with a passionate voice and razor-sharp attention to detail, showing us that nothing about it was inevitable. By unpacking the decisions that led to discrimination against nursing home residents, revealing how governments, doctors, and media reinforced agist or ableist biases, and collecting the previously little-heard voices of the residents who survived, Gullette helps us understand the workings of what she persuasively calls an eldercide.

Reviews for "American Eldercide"

"A masterpiece. Gullette writes with passion, a critical eye, and an often-sly sense of humor. She shows, in devastating detail, how we as a society failed our elderly population—and the lessons we must learn in order to avoid a similar catastrophe in the future.”—Harry Moody, former Vice President for Academic Affairs, AARP

“A remarkable and vivid description of one of the worst chapters in the history of nursing homes—orchestrated by corporate greed and profiteering. It is a wake-up call for the need for total reform or elimination of the institutions where older people are sent to die without dignity or care.”—Charlene Harrington, University of California, San Francisco

"Made in NuYoRico breaks down the secret ingredients of one of the most exciting musical melting pots of the era." - Derek Walmsley, The Wire

From the Publisher, Duke University Press:     In Made in NuYoRico, Marisol Negrón tells the cultural history of salsa, tracing the music’s Nuyorican meanings over a fifty-year period that begins with the establishment of Fania Records in 1964 and how it capitalized on salsa’s Nuyorican imaginary to cultivate a global audience. Drawing on interviews with fans, legendary musicians, and music industry figures as well as analyses of songs, albums, films, and archival documents, Negrón shows how Nuyorican cultural and social histories became embedded in and impacted salsa music's flows during its foundational period in the mid-1960s and its boom in the 1970s. Salsa’s Nuyorican aesthetics challenged mainstream notions of Americanness and Puerto Ricanness and produced an alternative public sphere through which New York’s poor and working-class Puerto Ricans could contest racialization and colonial power. By outlining salsa’s complicated musical, cultural, commercial, racial, gendered, legal, and political entanglements, Negrón demonstrates its centrality to Nuyorican identity and subjectivity.

Accomplished author Marjan Kamali, one of our WSRC Scholars, has published a new book, “The Lion Women of Tehran.” With glowing industry reviews from Oprah Daily and bestselling authors, this novel is not be missed. Pick up a copy today at a bookstore near you!

From the Simon & Schuster website:

From the nationally bestselling author of the “powerful, heartbreaking” (Shelf Awareness) "The Stationery Shop," a heartfelt, epic new novel of friendship, betrayal, and redemption set against three transformative decades in Tehran, Iran.

In 1950s Tehran, seven-year-old Ellie lives in grand comfort until the untimely death of her father, forcing Ellie and her mother to move to a tiny home downtown. Lonely and bearing the brunt of her mother’s endless grievances, Ellie dreams of a friend to alleviate her isolation.

Luckily, on the first day of school, she meets Homa, a kind, passionate girl with a brave and irrepressible spirit. Together, the two girls play games, learn to cook in the stone kitchen of Homa’s warm home, wander through the colorful stalls of the Grand Bazaar, and share their ambitions for becoming “lion women.”

But their happiness is disrupted when Ellie and her mother are afforded the opportunity to return to their previous bourgeois life. Now a popular student at the best girls’ high school in Iran, Ellie’s memories of Homa begin to fade. Years later, however, her sudden reappearance in Ellie’s privileged world alters the course of both of their lives.

Together, the two young women come of age and pursue their own goals for meaningful futures. But as the political turmoil in Iran builds to a breaking point, one earth-shattering betrayal will have enormous consequences.

Written with Marjan Kamali’s signature “evocative, devastating, and hauntingly beautiful” (Whitney Scharer, author of The Age of Light) prose, "The Lion Women of Tehran" is a sweeping exploration of how profoundly we are shaped by those we meet when we are young, and the way love and courage transforms our lives.

Dr. Edith Chears, a Scholar of the Women’s Studies Research Center, at Brandeis University, has received a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program award to Zimbabwe for the 2024-2025 academic year from the U.S. Department of State and the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.

Fulbright U.S. Scholars are faculty, researchers, administrators, and established professionals teaching or conducting research in affiliation with institutes abroad. Fulbright Scholars engage in cutting-edge research and expand their professional networks, often continuing research collaborations started abroad and laying the groundwork for forging future partnerships between institutions. Upon returning to their home countries, institutions, labs, and classrooms, they share their stories and often become active supporters of international exchange, inviting foreign scholars to campus and encouraging colleagues and students to go abroad.

Since 1946, the Fulbright Program has provided over 400,000 talented and accomplished students, scholars, teachers, artists, and professionals of all backgrounds with the opportunity to study, teach, and conduct research abroad. Fulbrighters exchange ideas, build people-to-people connections, and work to address complex global challenges. Notable Fulbrighters include 62 Nobel Laureates, 89 Pulitzer Prize winners, 80 MacArthur Fellows, 41 heads of state or government, and thousands of leaders across the private, public, and non-profit sectors.

Fulbright is a program of the U.S. Department of State, with funding provided by the U.S. Government. Participating governments and host institutions, corporations, and foundations around the world also provide direct and indirect support to the Program, which operates in over 160 countries worldwide.

In the United States, the Institute of International Education implements the Fulbright U.S. Student and U.S. Scholar Programs on behalf of the U.S. Department of State.