Featured News

Read IRW's new book, The Perils of Populism, edited by Sarah Tobias and Arlene Stein.

The seventh issue of IRW's journal, Rejoinder, is available online. The theme of issue seven is Trauma.

IRW's 2022-2023 theme is "Care." We welcome visiting faculty, graduate students, independent scholars, and activists to join us as Global Scholars.

Listen to IRW's new podcast series, Mnemosyne, named after the Greek goddess of memory. The podcast series is a space for feminist storytelling, with conversations about feminist work and research across disciplines. Mnemosyne is hosted by Andrea Zerpa and Ameena Qobrtay.

IRW welcomes visiting faculty, graduate students, independent scholars, and activists to join us during the 2021-2022 academic year. Learn more and apply to IRW as a Global Scholar. 

IRW's online journal Rejoinder has a new CFP, "Climate in Crisis." Read more here.

Are you exploring a new area of research relating to gender and sexuality, and looking for others to partner with? Would you like to sponsor a speaker or panel related to feminist issues and concerns? The Institute for Research on Women (IRW) supports working groups that seek to foster collaborative, interdisciplinary research on women, gender, and sexuality at Rutgers. Read our most recent call for working groups to learn more.

We invite applications for 2020-2021 Global Scholars from university based scholars and scholar/activists whose work is compatible with our annual theme, "Knowing Bodies: Science and the Sex/Gender Distinction." Please review our call for Global Scholars to learn more.

Save the date for our Spring Conference, Feeling Democracy: A Conference on Politics and Emotions, a virtual conference by Webex, on April 17, 2020 -- all day.

From social media flame wars to fiery political speeches, emotion shapes political rhetoric and action. Please join us for a one-day conference on how feminism can help us make sense of the complex relationship between emotions and democracy.

Feeling Democracy: A Conference on Politics and Emotions

Participant Bios

Kathryn Abrams is Herma Hill Kay Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. Her interest in emotion arose from two decades of work in feminist theory: in particular on storytelling, and on challenges to the dichotomy between reason and emotion. Since 2011, she has focused on the role of emotion in social movements, most recently in the movement of undocumented immigrants.

Nermin Allam is Assistant Professor of Politics at Rutgers University-Newark. Prior to joining Rutgers, she was a postdoctoral fellow and visiting scholar at Princeton University. Allam’s work has appeared in Social Research: An International Quarterly, Middle East Law and Governance, and Sociology of Islam.  Her book, Women and the Egyptian Revolution: Engagement and Activism during the 2011 Arab Uprisings, published by Cambridge University Press, offers an oral history of women’s engagement in Egypt’s modern contentious politics.

Nancy Chi Cantalupo is Assistant Professor of Law at Barry University. She has used civil/human rights law to combat gender-based violence for 25 years as a researcher, campus administrator, student activist, victims’ advocate, attorney, and policymaker. She has published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Gender, Yale Law Journal Forum, New York Times, USA Today, and Washington Post.

Belinda Davis is Professor of History and Director of the Center for European Studies at Rutgers University. She is the author or co-editor of five books and several dozen articles, on themes including popular politics and social movements, and conceptions of democracy. Her most recent book is The Internal Life of Politics: Extraparliamentary Opposition in West Germany, 1962-1983 (Cambridge University Press, 2019).

Deborah Gould is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her current project, Composing Collectivities: Appetites, Encounters, and the Not-Yet of Politics, has political emotion at its center. Her book Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS won the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award from the American Sociological Association’s Political Sociology Section and the Ruth Benedict Prize from the American Anthropological Association. She was in ACT UP/Chicago and was a founding member of Feel Tank Chicago, famous for its Parades of the Politically Depressed.

Kirin Gupta is pursuing a JD/PhD (History and Gender/Sexuality Studies) at Harvard University. She studies women terrorists in the former British Empire, working transnationally across fields of rebellion/security studies, gender studies, African studies, in the interest of deimperializing frameworks. Her dissertation is concerned with reframing categories of gender, insurgency, & military history.

Barbara Koziak is Associate Professor in the Department of Government and Politics at St. John’s University, and Director of the Global Development and Sustainability Major. Her research and teaching specialties include ancient Greek political theory, feminist theory, and global gender issues. She is the author of the book, Retrieving Political Emotion: Aristotle, Thumos, and Gender, and articles such as “Shepherding Romance: Brokeback Mountain and the Politics of Romantic Love.” In addition to her academic work, she worked as a Meetup organizer for the 2004 Dean campaign, and a local field organizer during the Obama campaign. 

Noëlle McAfee (Keynote Speaker) is Professor of Philosophy at Emory University, where she also holds a secondary appointment as Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and is affiliate faculty in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. In addition, she is the director of Emory’s Psychoanalytic Studies Program. She is co-editor, with Nick Felts, of The Kettering Review, a journal of political ideas dedicated to improving the quality of public life in American democracy. Several of her books, including Democracy and the Political Unconscious (Columbia University Press 2008), and Fear of Breakdown: Politics and Psychoanalysis (Columbia University Press 2019 -- winner of the American Psychoanalytic Association’s 2020 Courage to Dream Book Prize), address the relationship between politics and emotion.

Ileana Nachescu teaches in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department at Rutgers-New Brunswick. She is currently completing her manuscript, A Dimension of Humanism: Intellectual Activism and the National Alliance of Black Feminists (1974-1983). In a new research project, she analyzes the experiences of Eastern European immigrant women living in the United States by addressing both white privilege and dispossession.

Holloway Sparks is a political theorist and a scholar of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies who writes about the racialized and gendered politics of political dissent. She is currently a Visiting Research Scholar for the Vulnerability and the Human Condition Project at Emory University’s School of Law, and a Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta.

Ciara Torres Spelliscy is Professor of Law at Stetson University College of Law, where she teaches courses in Election Law, Corporate Governance, Business Entities, and Constitutional Law. Prior to joining Stetson's faculty, Professor Torres-Spelliscy was counsel in the Democracy Program of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. She was an associate at Arnold & Porter LLP and a staffer for Senator Richard Durbin. Professor Torres-Spelliscy is the author of the book Corporate Citizen? An Argument for the Separation of Corporation and State (Carolina 2016), and the book Political Brands (Elgar 2019).

Feeling Democracy: Conference Schedule

9.50 a.m. Welcoming Remarks Arlene Stein, Director, Institute for Research on Women

10.00 a.m. - 11 a.m. Panel 1

Belinda Davis, “‘Speaking the Self’, ‘Speaking of Bitterness’: Feminism and a New Politics in 1970s West Germany”

Kirin Gupta, “Imagining the Anti-Colony: Rage, Mourning, and Terror in Women’s Solidarities in Afro-Asia”

Ileana Nachescu, “From Passions to Politics: Women’s Feelings Toward Other Women and the National Alliance of Black Feminists (1974-1983)”

11.05 a.m. - 12.05 p.m. Panel 2

Nancy Chi Cantalupo, “Emotion, Democracy & Protecting Title IX”

Holloway Sparks, “‘Feminazis’ 1, Limbaugh 0: Gendering the Performativity of Political Anger in the ‘War on Women’”

12.45 p.m. - 1.30 p.m. Keynote Lecture by Noëlle McAfee

1.35 p.m. - 2.35 p.m. Panel 3

Nermin Allam, “Women, Hope, and Activism in Egypt”

Barbara Koziak, “Feeling Patriarchal”

2.40 p.m. - 3.40 p.m. Panel 4

Kathryn Abrams, “That’s When My Message Would Come Across the Strongest…”: Sharing and Managing Emotion in the Undocumented Immigrants Movement

Deborah Gould, “Passion and Danger in the Age of Trump”

Ciara Torres Spelliscy, “Stuck in an Information Silo: How Branding can Overtake Truth in an Election.”

3.45 p.m. - 4.15 p.m. Wrap up

Apply to join IRW's 2020-2021 seminar. The application deadline is January 31. Read more here.

IRW's online journal Rejoinder has a new CFP on Storytelling for Social Change. Read more here.

IRW is planning an April 2020 conference on politics and the emotions. View the call for papers and submit a proposal by November 15.

We are working with the Rutgers Oral History Archives to document IRW’s early history. Read a transcript of the first interview, a conversation with Distinguished Professor Emerita Ferris Olin, who served as IRW’s Executive Officer between 1985 and 1994.

Read IRW's newsletter or our online journal Rejoinder.

Join IRW in 2019-2020 as a visiting global scholar.

The New York Times recommends IRW Director Arlene Stein's new book.