Bodies / Archives / Databases

Our museums and computers store bodies. Some are physical, appearing as material objects or as the “negative space” around them, and others are abstracted.

The 2016-17 Gender and Sexuality Seminar Series interrogates the space between the archive, site of haunted specificity and historical embeddedness, and the database, locus of standardization and generalizable knowledge about human normativity, pathology, and variation.

All events take place from 5-7 pm in the Plimpton Room (Barker Center 133, 12 Quincy St.) and are open to the public.

September 15, 2016 – Kimberly Juanita Brown (Mt. Holyoke) Their Dead Among Us: Presence, Absence, and Archival Violence

October 20, 2016 – Douglas Bolender (UMass Boston) Marginal Lives and Fractured Families: Archives and Rural Farmworkers in Early Modern Iceland

November 10, 2016 – Meredith Reiches (UMass Boston) Invisible Women: Prenatal Nutrition Research and the Vanishing Maternal Body

March 9, 2017 – Nancy Krieger (Harvard) Challenging Biological Essentialism with Embodied Histories of Health Inequities

RESCHEDULED -- April 13, 2017 – Evelynn M. Hammonds (Harvard) The Physician's Negro:  Race and Racialization in U.S. Medicine
This talk will be held in Boylston Hall Room 355

Sponsored by the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard and the Committee on Degrees in Studies 
of Women, Gender, and Sexuality.

Questions? wgssymposia@fas.harvard.edu

Directions 

The Barker Center is bordered by Prescott, Harvard, and Quincy Streets. Enter the courtyard from Quincy Street, opposite the Lamont Gate. The Barker Center is the large brick building facing the Faculty Club. The Humanities Center administrative offices are located on the first floor in rooms 136 and 135. To locate Humanities Center seminar events, please consult the postings in the Barker Center main lobby. 

Harvard University
Plimpton Room
Barker Center 133
12 Quincy Street
Cambridge, MA

Parking

Parking is available at no charge, on a space available basis, at the Broadway Garage, located on Felton St. between Cambridge St. and Broadway. The garage closes at midnight. All parkers should identify themselves as participants in a seminar at the Humanities Center (the guard's list of events does not include the names of individual seminars) and should arrive close to the time that the seminar begins. If the garage is full, which is more likely prior to 4:00 p.m., ask the attendant to direct you to another Harvard parking facility.