Gender: New Works, New Questions series highlights faculty books

This fall, IRWG hosted two special panel discussions as part of our long-running series, Gender: New Works, New Questions. In September, we celebrated Ava Purkiss’s Fit Citizens: A History of Black Women's Exercise from Post-Reconstruction to Postwar America (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) with a conversation with Jennifer Dominique Jones and Meg Sweeney. Purkiss’s book, the first historical study of Black women's exercise, explores how exercise enabled Black women to reimagine Black bodies, health, beauty, and recreation in the twentieth century.

Last month, Erin Cech, Megan Killian, and Harmony Reppond discussed Cech’s award winning book The Trouble with Passion: How Searching for Fulfillment at Work Fosters Inequality (University of California Press, 2021). This comprehensive study explores how career advice to “follow your passion” reproduces workforce inequalities. (pictured at right)

Since 2011, IRWG has featured 37 publications as part of this series. The format features the author or editor, along with faculty discussants from different disciplinary backgrounds. As celebratory events, we also include a book giveaway.

The next event in the series is scheduled for February 2024, which will feature Jennifer Dominique Jones’s new book, Ambivalent Affinities: A Political History of Blackness and Homosexuality after World War II (University of North Carolina Press, 2023).

IRWG's Gender: New Works, New Questions Series (beginning with the most recent)

• The Trouble with Passion: How Searching for Fulfillment at Work Fosters Inequality, by Erin A. Cech, Oct 25, 2023
• Fit Citizens: A History of Black Women's Exercise from Post-Reconstruction to Postwar America, by Ava Purkiss, Sep 28, 2023
• Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters, by Petra Kuppers, Nov 16, 2022
• Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography, edited by Blake Gutt & Alicia Spencer-Hall, Dec 3, 2021
• Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance, by Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Oct 13, 2021
• Remaking a Life: How Women Living with HIV/AIDS Confront Inequality, by Celeste Watkins-Hayes, Mar 25, 2021
• Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire, by Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel, Mar 12, 2021
• Divided Bodies: Lyme Disease, Contested Illness, and Evidence-Based Medicine, by Abigail Dumes, Feb 21, 2021
• Separated: Family and Community in the Aftermath of an Immigration Raid, by William D. Lopez, Oct 29, 2021
• Ovidian Transversions: 'Iphis and Ianthe,' 1450-1650, edited by Valerie Traub & Peggy McCracken, Feb 24, 2020
• Queer Kinship & Family Change in Taiwan, by Amy Brainer, Feb 21, 2020
• Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right Is Warping the American Imagination, by Alexandra Minna Stern, Nov 1, 2019
• Chicana Movidas: New Narratives of Activism and Feminism in the Movement Era,  by Maria Cotera, Oct 11, 2019
• For Dear Life: Women's Decriminalization and Human Rights in Focus, by Carol Jacobsen, Sep 18, 2019
• The War on Sex, edited by Trevor Hoppe and David M. Halperin, Mar 22, 2019
• Branding Humanity: Competing Narratives of Rights, Violence, and Global Citizenship, by Amal Hassan Fadlalla, Mar 13, 2019
• Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement, by Naomi André, Jan 22, 2019
• Robo sapiens japanicus: Robots, Gender, Family, and the Japanese Nation, by Jennifer Robertson, Dec 5, 2018
• The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe: A History, by Rita Chin, Feb 6, 2018
• PearlStitch, by Petra Kuppers, Nov 29, 2017
• The Vaccine Court, by Anna Kirkland, Mar 22, 2017
• Finding Women in the State, by Wang Zheng, Feb 13, 2017
• Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women, edited by Mia E. Bay, Farah J. Griffin, Martha S. Jones, & Barbara D. Savage, Jan 18, 2017
• Metroimperial Intimacies, by Victor Mendoza, Oct 6, 2016
• A Nervous State, by Nancy Rose Hunt, Feb 17, 2016
• Dancers as Diplomats, by Clare Croft, Nov 2, 2015
• Rednecks, Queers & Country Music, by Nadine Hubbs, Feb 9, 2015
• Animal Acts: Performing Species Today, edited by Una Chaudhuri and Holly Hughes, Nov 11, 2014
• Paying for the Party, by Elizabeth A. Armstrong, Feb 17, 2014
• Deviations, by Gayle Rubin, Sep 23, 2013
• After the History of Sexuality, edited by Scott Spector & Helmut Puff, Mar 18, 2013
• Transnational Feminism in the United States, by Leela Fernandes, Jan 31, 2013
• How to Be Gay, by David Halperin, Sep 11, 2012
• The Sex of Men: in Premodern Europe, by Patricia Simons, Jan 23, 2012
• Gender and Jewish History, by Deborah Dash Moore, Sep 15, 2011
• Gender in the Archives, by Theresa Tinkle, Mar 9, 2011
• The House on Diamond Hill, by Tiya Miles, Feb 10, 2011