Amrita and Rekha Basu, "Women and Other Wartime Casualties"

Amrita Basu received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University. Dr. Basu teaches at Amherst College in Political Science and Women's and Gender Studies, and directs the Five College Women's Studies Research Center. She is the author of Two Faces of Protest: Contrasting Modes of Women's Activism in India (1992), editor of The Challenge of Local Feminisms: Women's Movements in Global Perspective (1995) and co-editor of Appropriating Gender: Women's Activism and Politicized Religion in South Asia (1998) and Community Conflicts and the State in India (1997), with numerous scholarly articles and conference presentations on women's activism, women and social movements, women and religious politics, post-colonial feminism and women's human rights.

Rekha Basu received her Masters in Journalism from Columbia and her Masters in political economy from Goddard Cambridge Graduate School. She is an editorial writer and columnist for The Des Moines Register's Opinion and Lifestyle pages, where she covers topics ranging from urban revival to global human rights to local assaults on women's equality. At the end of 2000 she temporarily left The Register to become a columnist at The South Florida Sun-Sentinel, where her dispatches from New York after 9/11 earned her a variety of newspaper awards including one from the South Asian Journalists Association, for a piece on a Bangladeshi widow called "A Birth, a Death Change Woman's Life." Her byline has appeared in national publications including the New York Times and The Nation, and her Register columns are distributed nationally through Gannett News Service. Her last Noun Convocation in 1996 was titled "Still Stuck, Stiffed and Stigmatized: Feminism's Unfinished Business."

The Noun Program, founded in 1986 and endowed by Joe Rosenfield, was named after his sister Louise Noun, an Iowa feminist activist, art collector, and author of Iowa Women in the WPA. Louise Noun died this September at age 94. One of her legacies is a vital program dedicated to bringing to campus speakers in international feminisms and other issues concerning gender and women around the globe.