Kay Warren, professor of international studies and anthropology, has been appointed the new director of the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women.
"I'm delighted," Warren said. "I like the idea of people from different disciplines focusing on common issues, but from different perspectives, and starting to exchange ideas. "
Warren, who came to Brown from Harvard in 2003, is on leave this year working on a book about human trafficking. She will begin acting as director on July 1.
While Warren is on leave, Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, associate professor of comparative literature and Italian studies and director of gender and sexuality studies, is the acting director of the center. Stewart-Steinberg said of Warren, "She's a wonderful collaborator and extremely capable of bringing people from all kinds of different disciplines together for dialogue."
The Pembroke Center, founded in 1981 by Joan Wallach Scott as a research center on gender, supports interdisciplinary research and teaching in the humanities and social studies, according to the center's website. Despite the name of the center, it does not limit itself exclusively to the study of women or gender, but rather to many broader issues around difference in historical, political and social terms, Stewart-Steinberg said.
The center has faculty "with a lot of interests, so the issue is how you focus your interest in those fields on the benefits and risks of change," Warren said. "That has a gender dimension but it also has lots of other social dimensions."
Fundamental to the center, Stewart-Steinberg said, is the yearlong Pembroke seminar — typically composed of three faculty members and three post-doctoral fellows from outside Brown, as well as graduate students and undergraduates selected through an application process.
Warren became involved with the center when she led last year's seminar, which focused on two themes: international circulation of health technology and international circulation of labor.
"I learned an incredible amount about different fields," Warren said. "This was a dynamic seminar. There were debates. There were disagreements. There were moments of insight where everyone went ‘oh my gosh, look at that!' We kept learning. It never stopped."
The center has many projects going on right now, including a collaboration with Nanjing University in China on gender studies, Stewart-Steinberg said. The schools are currently exchanging faculty and will later trade students as well, she said.
Another key project is an effort to collect papers of all the great feminist theorists. "This promises to be a really exciting project. Some of the top feminist theorists in this country and Canada have promised their papers already," Stewart-Steinberg said.
Warren said she is also thrilled about this archival project, adding that she dreams of being able to invite historians to do research in these archives.
"I think the range of what people can do at the Pembroke Center is only limited by people's imaginations," Warren said.
