Open to the Public. Free of Charge.

Scroll down for information on our February 10, 2005 event!

1.   Thursday, September 30, 2004

Cynthia & Allan Mondell, Filmmakers

Will be present to show and discuss their film:

THE SPIRIT OF WOMEN documents an historic event that changed the course of the women's movement. In November of l977, twenty thousand women and men left their jobs and homes in cities and town around the country to meet at the first National Women's Conference in Houston, Texas. Their goal was to end discrimination against women and promote their equal rights. Rare archival footage breathes life into heated debates over issues like the equal rights amendment, reproductive freedom, lesbian rights, sexual preference and minority rights. Former First Ladies Rosalynn Carter, Betty Ford, Lady Bird Johnson, and activists including Coretta Scott King, Bella Abzug and Barbara Jordan were on the front lines to develop a Plan of Action. Current interviews with Gloria Steinem, Ellie Smeal, Ann Richards, Carmen Delgado Votaw, Liz Carpenter and Betty Friedan bring a deeper understanding to the legacy of the Conference.

Co-sponsored by the The Carolyn Lipshy Galerstein Women's Center of the University of Texas at Dallas  

7-9 p.m., UT- Dallas  Conference Center Rm.  CN 1.102

Cynthia and Allen have been making award-winning docudramas and documentary films and videos together for 25 years. Their work explores a wide range of subjects but always with the goal of personalizing often complex social problems. Many of their films have aired nationwide on public television, cable and at festivals worldwide. They were artists-in-residence here at the University of Texas, Dallas.

Some of their work includes: Funny Women, a film celebrating women comedians at The Women’s Museum: An Institute for the Future, West of Hester Street, a docudrama about Jewish immigration through Galveston, Texas, in the early 1900s; Films from the Sixth Floor, six films about the life, death and legacy of President John F. Kennedy, at The Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas; and Dreams of Equality, produced for the Women's Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls, New York.

2. Monday, October 11, 2004

Lillian Furst, Ph.D.

Windows on the Past: The Novel as Social History.

Dr. Furst will demonstrate how much there is to learn from fiction about about nineteenth-century women doctors and about women's work.  She will also share some more general observations about the  usability of fiction as a source for social history. 

Dr. Lilian Furst is Marcel Bataillon Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of North Caroline, Chapel Hill.  From 1975-1986, she was Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Dallas.  She received her Ph.D.  from Cambridge University in 1957, and her books include Idioms of Distress:  Psychosomatic disorders in Medical and Imaginative Literature (New York: SUNY Press), Medical Progress and Social Reality: A Nineteenth-Century Reader (Albany, NY: SUNY Press), and Women Healers and Physicians: Climbing a Long Hill (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press), among many others.  Dr. Furst has lectured extensively both nationally and internationally, her work has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and she has received numerous awards and recognition for both her scholarship and her teaching.

10-11:15 a.m., UT-Dallas Conference Center Rm.  CN 1.102

3.   Thursday, January 27, 2005

Susan Platt, Ph.D.

Public Politics and Domestic Rituals:  Contemporary Art by Women in Turkey 1980-2000

"I will discuss the work of contemporary women artists in Turkey who  engage both international political issues and domestic issues within Turkey. The artists work in many media: photography, installation,
 video, painting, sculpture and conceptual art.  I will demonstrate the  ways in which their art is shaped by Turkish history and contemporary  politics in Turkey."
 

Dr. Susan N. Platt is a freelance art historian and critic who is currently writing a book on "activism and artists in the contemporary world." Her previous book was Art and Politics in the 1930s: Modernism,
Marxism, Americanism, A History of Cultural Activism During the  Depression Years, published by Midmarch Arts Press in 1999. She is currently visiting professor at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas.
 

12:30 - 1:45 p.m.  U.T. Dallas Green Hall,   GR 4.428

4.  Thursday, February 10, 2005

Julie Novkov, Ph.D.

Negotiating and Entrenching White Supremacy:  Interracial Sex and Alabama Law, 1930-1950

Co-sponsored by the Legal Studies Lecture Series, School of Social Sciences, The University of Texas at Dallas

Julie Novkov (A.B. Harvard-Radcliffe, 1989; J.D. NYU School of Law, 1992; Ph.D. University of Michigan, 1998) is the author of Constituting Workers, Protecting Women: Gender, Law, and Labor in the Progressive Era (Michigan, 2001). She is currently completing a book manuscript on the legal regulation of interracial marriage in Alabama from the end of the Civil War to the Second Reconstruction.

11-12:15pm  U.T. Dallas Conference Center CN 1.112

5. Thursday, April 7,  2005

 Joan C. Williams

 "The Maternal Wall: Do Moms "Opt Out" at Work - Or Are They Pushed Out?"

Joan Williams (B.A. Yale University; J.D. Harvard Law School; M.A. MIT) is Professor of Law at American University, Washington College of Law, and an expert on work/family issues. She is the prize-winning author of Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What To Do About It (Oxford University Press, 1999), which won the 2000 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award. She has written or co-written four books and more than 50 scholarly articles, and she is Founding Director of WorkLife Law. Her work on the Maternal Wall was recently cited prominently by the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in Back v. Hastings on Hudson Union Free School District (2004), and she has been widely quoted in the press in publications as diverse as The New York Times, Business Week, and O.

6-7:45 pm MC 2.410 (McDermott Library Auditorium)