The Department of Anthropology in Arts & Sciences is presenting a seminar series throughout this academic year and into next titled “Interrogating Diversity: Race, Gender, and Class Across Time and Space.”
The first speaker in the series is Barbara A. Koenig, PhD, professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and a faculty associate in the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota, who will present “The Meaning of ‘Race’ in a Genomic Age” at 4 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 12, in McMillan Hall, Room 149.
Funding for the series was provided in part by a grant from WUSTL’s Diversity and Inclusion Grants program.
“This series draws on anthropology’s core mission to study diversity in culture, gender, race, species and class by provoking faculty and students from across the university to engage intellectually with important questions at the core of diversity initiatives,” says Carolyn Sargent, PhD, professor of anthropology and of women, gender, and sexuality studies, both in Arts & Sciences, and organizer of the series.
“Those questions include, ‘What is diversity?’ ‘What are its complex and contested meanings to specialists in human biological variation, to those who study gender, race and class in contemporary cultures and to archaeologists who focus on the distant past?’ ‘To what extent is it possible to investigate diversity in antiquity?’ ‘How are we to understand race-based medicine in the context of disputes over the validity of the concept race?’ ” Sargent says.
The other speakers in the series are:
- Jonathan Marks, PhD, professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, Dec. 14;
- Joseph Watkins, PhD, director of the Native American Studies Program at the University of Oklahoma, Feb. 15, 2011;
- Anna Abge-Davies, PhD, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, March 22, 2011;
- Evelynn M. Hammonds, PhD, dean of Harvard College, April 5, 2011;
- Duana Fullwiley, PhD, assistant professor of anthropology at Harvard University, April 19, 2011;
- Sarah Tishkoff, PhD, the David and Lyn Silfen University Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Oct. 18, 2011.
All events, which are free and open to the public, will be held at 4 p.m. in McMillan Hall, Room 149.
For more information, e-mail csargent@wustl.edu.