The Gender and History Lecture Series Presents
Maylei Blackwell
Associate Professor in the César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o Studies and Women's Studies Department at UCLA
speaking on
“Geographies of Difference: Cautionary Tales from Transnational Feminist Travels”
4:30 pm on Tuesday, September 23
Konover Auditorium, Dodd Center
Prof. Blackwell is the author of ¡Chicana Power! Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement. She is now working on a book on indigenous women's organizing in Mexico and along the migrant stream, tentatively titled Scales of Resistance: Indigenous Women’s Organizing in the Age of Neoliberalism. Her visit is co-sponsored by the History Department, El Instituto and the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program and generously funded by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
We encourage you to join us for the lecture and to stay for the reception afterward. Prof. Blackwell will also lead a seminar focusing on a pre-circulated essay, on Wednesday, September 24, from 10 to 11:30 a.m. in the Wood Hall basement lounge. If you wish to participate, please contact faculty coordinator Nina Dayton (cornelia.dayton@uconn.edu) or graduate student coordinator Amy Sopcak-Joseph (amy.sopcak@uconn.edu) for a copy of the reading.
More about the Visiting Scholar:
Maylei Blackwell is an Associate Professor in the César E. Chávez Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is also at UCLA affiliated with the Gender Studies Department and the American Indian and LGBT Studies Programs. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. from the History of Consciousness Department (Women’s Studies) at the University of California at Santa Cruz; before that, she double majored in history and interdisciplinary studies of race and gender at California State University at Long Beach. Her first book, ¡Chicana Power! Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement, was published in 2011 by the University of Texas Press as part of the Chicana Matters Series. It is based on her oral histories of activist women in the 1960s and 1970s and provides an important corrective to histories of the Chicano movement that ignored the work of Chicana feminists.
Prof. Blackwell has also been dubbed a “Woman Who Rocks” by the Women Who Rock Community, and she was filmed for her own oral history interview, available at http://content.lib.washington.edu/wwrweb/write-to-rock/bioBlackwell_Maylei.html. In the interview, she describes her interests as “social movements, women’s organizing in the US and Mexico, and cross-border organizing.” From 2003 to 2010, she created and edited Activist Notebooks/Cuadernos Militantes, an occasional section of Chicana/Latina Studies: A Journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social (MALCS).
Among her articles, book chapters, poems, and policy reports are:
- “The Practice of Autonomy in the Age of Neoliberalism: Strategies from the Indigenous Women’s Movement in Mexico,” Journal of Latin American Studies 44:4 (2012)
- “Encountering Latin American and Caribbean Feminisms [Roundtable],” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28:2 (2002)
- Introduction to the Special Dossier she edited on Gender, Activism, and the US-Mexico Border, in Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 31:1 (2013)
For more information, contact: Nina Dayton at cornelia.dayton@uconn.edu