Scholars of Race & Sexual Violence Discuss the Politics of Human Thriving
7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 1, 2017
Two scholars of race and sexual violence — Sharon Block, a historian, and Ladelle McWhorter, a philosopher and social theorist — will discuss “Race, Sexual Violence, and the Politics of Human Thriving” in a free, public event at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 1, 2017, in Joe Rosenfield ’25 Center, Room 101.
In this special interdisciplinary event, the two will illustrate how humanistic inquiry can help us think through pressing questions in our individual and collective lives. Each will briefly discuss their own approaches and the insights they make possible before opening to extended conversation and questions.
Caleb Elfenbein, director of the Center for the Humanities, will moderate.
Sharon Block
Sharon Block is a professor of history at University of California, Irvine. She works in colonial North American history, with specializations in history of sexuality, race, and the body, as well as more broadly in computational humanities. She is the author of Rape and Sexual Power in Early America and the forthcoming Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-Century America.
She was an early advocate for computational humanities and published a variety of articles using topic modeling, including on the place of women’s history in academic publishing. She is a co-editor of Major Problems in American Women’s History and a special issue of the William and Mary Quarterly on sexuality in early America. She has also published an additional two dozen articles and essays focused on rape, the history of sexuality and gender, and race in colonial North America. She has promoted campus diversity and inclusion as an equity advisor, served as an undergraduate associate dean, run an education abroad program in Australia, and currently serves on University of California, Irvine’s peer review committee on faculty sexual harassment and sexual violence.
Ladelle McWhorter
Ladelle McWhorter is author of Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization, Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A Genealogy, and more than three dozen articles on Foucault, Bataille, Irigaray, and race theory. With Gail Stenstad, she edited Heidegger and the Earth: Essays in Environmental Philosophy. She holds the Stephanie Bennett Smith Chair in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and is also professor of environmental studies and holds an appointment in the philosophy department at the University of Richmond in Richmond, Virginia.