Zakiyyah Iman Jackson is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Center for Feminist Research at the University of Southern California. Her research explores the literary and aesthetic aspects of Western philosophical and scientific discourse and investigates the engagement of African diasporic literature, film, and visual art with the historical concerns, knowledge claims, and rhetoric of Western science and philosophy. Professor Jackson is the author of Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. Becoming Human is a call for rethinking the philosophical import of African diasporic literature and visual art. It demonstrates that gender, sexuality, and maternity are integral sites for producing a human-animal distinction that persistently reproduces the racial logics and orders of Western thought. Talk will be livestreamed on Zoom: Friday, February 24 at 5-6pm ET.

Ann Braithwaite is Professor and Coordinator of Diversity and Social Justice Studies at the University of Prince Edward Island. Her current scholarly work focuses on questions of "disciplinarity" and its intellectual, pedagogical, and institutional consequences, especially as they impact Women’s and Gender Studies (the most common way to name this discipline). Her publications include: "Everyday Women's and Gender Studies" (co-authored with Catherine M. Orr, forthcoming Routledge 2016), "Rethinking Women's and Gender Studies" (co-edited with Catherine M. Orr and Diane Lichtenstein, Routledge 2012), and "Troubling Women's Studies" (co-authored with Susan Heald, Susanne Luhmann, and Sharon Rosenberg, Sumach Press 2005). Talk will be livestreamed on Zoom: Saturday, February 25 at 5-6pm ET.

Dr. Jill Wood is a Teaching Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies with her PhD in Biobehavioral Health and Women's Studies. Her research critiques the (bio)medicalization of women's health (specifically menstruation, pregnancy and childbirth, and the menopausal transition) and women's sexualities (particularly sexual desire and sexual response models).  In the area of reproductive justice, Dr. Wood examines the coercive use of contraceptive methods like LARCs (long-acting reversible contraceptives) as a state sanctioned form of social control among vulnerable populations. Similarly, Wood’s work on birth justice discusses how risk medicine and fetal rights discourse contributes to the surveillance and disembodiment of pregnant individuals. Talk will be livestreamed on Zoom and in-person in Willard 362: Friday, February 24 at 6-7pm ET.

C. Libby is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Libby holds a Ph.D. in Religious Studies, with a minor in Gender Studies and a certificate in medieval studies from Indiana University. Their research and teaching interests include medieval Christian spirituality, gender and sexuality studies, affect theory, and the history of emotions. Libby's current project, (En)Gendering Feeling in the Middle Ages, places textual accounts of premodern gender crossing in conversation with contemporary scholarship in queer and trans studies. This project aims to make sense of the contested terrain of gendered embodiment by examining how affective intensities (anger, wonder, desire, fear) are produced around and through gender transgressive bodies. Talk will be livestreamed on Zoom and in-person in Willard 362: Saturday, February 25 at 6-7pm ET.