November 14, 2008
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA

The Joint Faculty/Student Seminar on Violence, Race, and Gender is designed to offer a unique space for intellectual community-building where advanced graduate students and faculty scholars who do work at the intersection of violence, race, and gender can collaborate. Joy James, Professor of Humanities and Political Science at Williams College and author of Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender and Race in U.S. Culture, and Andrea Smith, Assistant Professor of American Culture and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan and author of Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide, will lead the day-long seminar along with Macarena Gómez-Barris, Assistant Professor of Sociology and American Studies and Ethnicity at USC, who will moderate.

The seminar will consist of two groups of participants. The first will include six students whose papers will serve as the framework for the seminar. Professors James and Smith will respond to the papers and help structure the discussion. Joining in the discussion will be the second group of participants—a small cohort of faculty members and graduate students from the USC community whose work is also implicated in the intersection of violence, race and gender. All participants will be responsible for reading in advance the pre-circulated papers and a representative text (TBA) that will engage central themes to be raised in the seminar.

The organizer invites abstracts from graduate students who have completed substantial papers (20+ pages) they are looking to publish and/or develop into dissertation chapters. Submissions from across a range of disciplines, dealing with any topic related to the intersection of violence, race, and gender, are invited. Depending upon the availability of funds, participants selected from outside of the Los Angeles area may be provided small stipends to help offset the costs of attending the seminar. Further details will be provided to those chosen to participate.

Interested students should submit the following:

• A one-page abstract
• An abbreviated CV
• A one-page statement addressing your interest in attending the seminar and its potential usefulness for your work.
• A statement of your audio/visual needs, if necessary.

Materials should be submitted in Word format (please no submissions in Vista) by September 10, 2008. Late submissions will not be considered. Selected participants will be notified by September 15, 2008, and final papers will be due by October 15, 2008.