Free International Conference, UMA
Exploring Women’s Testimony: Genocide, War, Revolution, The Holocaust, and Human Rights
On October 9th and 10th, 2014 the University of Maine at Augusta, Colby College, and the Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine will jointly co-sponsor a free international conference to explore and advance awareness of gendered issues as it relates to human rights abuses. Exploring Women’s Tesitmony: Genocide, War, Revolution, The Holocaust, and Human Rights will explore the unique tapestries of women’s experiences as they recount and tell stories, and the fluctuation of memory. This narrative will be viewed through the lens of contemporary storytelling that includes literature, theater, cinema, art and new media.
The program begins on Thursday, October 9th, at the Michael Klahr Center of the Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine on the campus of UMA. Four panels and presentations will be held during the day focusing on issues of women’s voices of the Holocaust, testimony in cinematic narrative, digital circulation and memorialization, and Art and the Representation of Women’s Trauma.
Following a dinner break, the evening will feature a lecture/play reading of Joyce Van Dyke’s Deported/A Dream Story, a play focusing on the Armenian genocide. The event will be led by the author.
On Friday October 10th, the conference will shift to Colby College in Waterville, where the panels and planned presentations include: Worldwide Perspectives: Women’s Voices, Voices from Rwanda, and The United States: Re-telling American Women’s Lost Voices.
The event will conclude with a reception at the Colby Museum of Art.
Presenters for the conference are scheduled to include:
Ethel Brooks – Associate Professor in the Departments of Women’s and Gender Studies and Sociology at Rutgers University, and the Undergraduate Director in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies.
Audrey Brunetaux – Assistant Professor of French Studies at Colby College. Her research focuses on 20th-century French literature, culture and cinema with an emphasis on Holocaust narratives and films.
Clare Byarugaba – Co-coordinator of the Civil Society Coalition on Human Rights and Constitutional Law, and one of the leaders in the Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender Inter sex (LGBTI) movement in Uganda.
Jennifer Cazenave – A Post-doctoral Teaching Fellow at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She is currently preparing a manuscript on the representation of women in the film Shoah, and in the outtakes of the film.
Rhea Cote Robbins – A Maine native, she is a founder and Executive Director of the Franco-American Women’s Institute.
Alexandre E. Dauge-Roth – An Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Bates College. Topic for his presentation: Women’s Transformative Voices within the Literature Bearing witness to the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda.
Joyce Van Dyke – An award-winning playwright, she is a MacDowell Colony Fellow, a Huntington Theater Playwriting Fellow and a winner of Boston’s Elliot Norton Award. Joyce received her PhD from the University of Virginia. She currently teaches courses in Shakespeare at Harvard University’s Extension School.
Mona El-Naggar – A video journalist at The New York Times, she produced her first film, Istislam, in 2013. It explores the Muslim Brotherhood’s grassroots work and prevailing attitude towards women.
Rangira (Bea) Gallimore – An Associate Professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia, she is the founder and president of Step Up! American Association for Rwandan Women. She is also a co-founder and member of the board of the Interdisciplinary Genocide Studies Center in Rwanda.
Christine Holden – Associate Professor of History Emerita from the University of Southern Maine, where she taught courses in European and Russian history, including European Women’s History, and the first college-level class on the Holocaust in Maine.
Elmina Kulasic- She is the Executive Director at the Association for Transitional Justice, Accountability and Remembrance. She served as the Project Development Coordinator and Interviewer at the Cinema for Peace Foundation in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where she was responsible for the collection of testimonies for the Genocide Film Library in Bosnia-Herzegovina Project.
Sarah Lightman – A London-based artist, curator, writer and filmmaker, her art focuses on graphic novels. She is the co-founder of Laydeez do Comics, the first women’s led autobiographical comic forum in the UK.
Jennifer Musto – An Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College, her research broadly focuses on the laws, policies, and technologies designed to respond to prostitution, human and sex trafficking, and forced labor in the United States, with particular focus on individuals and communities deemed “at risk.”
Chris Myers Asch – He co-founded the Sunflower Country Freedom Project that provides educational opportunities to children in rural Mississippi. His first book, The Senator and the Sharecropper: The Freedom Struggles of James 0. Eastland and Fannie Lou Hamer, earned the Liberty Legacy Foundation Prize from the Organization of American Historians, the McLemore Prize from the Mississippi Historical Society, and the Mississippi Library Association Non-Fiction Award.
Parnian Nazary – She is an Advocacy Manager for Women for Afghan Women (WAW), a women’s human rights organization operating 28 centers in Afghanistan and a center in New York. She grew up in Afghanistan and Pakistan, is fluent in Dari/Farsi, Urdu, and Arabic; and conversational in Pashtu and Hindi. She is a graduate of Seeds of Peace program.
Anna Norris – A Professor of French Studies at Michigan State University, she has published two books on prison writings and women and war. She is currently finishing a book manuscript on Marie Cappelle LaFarge who was convicted of murdering her husband with arsenic in 1840 and was the first person to be convicted of a crime by direct forensic toxicological evidence.
Ellen Taylor – She is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Maine at Augusta, and a published poet. Topic for her presentation: The House as Metaphor: Women’s Testimony in Were The House Still Standing.
Shu-chin Tsui – She is an Associate Professor of Asian Studies and Film Studies at Bowdoin College, and the author of Women Through the Lens: Gender and Nation in a Centwy of Chinese Cinema. Topic for her presentation: Body and Pain: From Gendering the Body: Women’s Visual Art in Contemporary China.
Exploring Women’s Testimony: Genocide, War Revolution, The Holocaust, and Human Rights is aimed at students of all ages, educators, and life-long learners.
Contact hours for teachers and life-long learners are available by pre-registration.
For more information, the complete schedule, or to register for this free conference, visit www.hhrcmaine.org or email infohhrc@maine.edu.
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