Please join the Institute for Research on Women (IRW) for the final event in its 2024-2025 Distinguished Lecture Series, a performative lecture with Kay Turner (folklorist and performer ? Douglass College ?71) and Ann Cvetkovich (University of Texas at Austin) on Thursday, April 10 at 4:30 pm in the Mabel Smith Douglass Room, Douglass Library.
IRW Distinguished Lecture Series Event ? ?The Witch Works: Altars, Archives, Affects?
Thursday, April 10, 2025 @ 4:30 pm
Speakers
Kay Turner is an artist working across disciplines including writing, music, performance, and folklore. Turner holds a PhD in folklore from the University of Texas at Austin. She has taught courses on gender and queer theory, ghosts and their ontologies, and fairy tale performance in the Performance Studies Department at New York University. Her books include Beautiful Necessity: The Art and Meaning of Women?s Altars and Transgressive Tales: Queering the Grimms. She founded and edited (with sisters in the Sowing Circle Press collective) Lady-Unique-Inclination-of-the-Night (1976-1983), an early feminist journal dedicated to exploration of the goddess. Turner's current book and performance project, What a Witch, queerly rethinks and rehabilitates the witch figure. Her recent performance works include What a Witch, Parts 1-9, including "Muses of Malta: Witch-Goddess-Madonna" (performed in Malta, 2018), "Night Hags: Visitation" (2018), ?Hansel and Gretel Queered (Devouring)? (2017), "The Croning" (2016), "Witch Mark: Evidence" (2016), and "Spurning Fertility/Smashing Tchotchkes" (2016-2018). Turner writes songs, sings, and has performed in numerous bands, including the lesbian-feminist ?Girls in the Nose? (active 1985-1996) and ?Kay Turn Her and the Pages.? She has served as folklorist for the borough of Brooklyn and president of the American Folklore Society.
Ann Cvetkovich is Professor of Women?s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and Professor Emeritus in the Feminist Institute of Social Transformation at Carleton University. She was previously the Ellen Clayton Garwood Centennial Professor of English and inaugural director of LGBTQ Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (Rutgers, 1992); An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Duke, 2003); and Depression: A Public Feeling (Duke, 2012). She co-edited (with Ann Pellegrini) ?Public Sentiments,? a special issue of The Scholar and Feminist Online, and (with Janet Staiger and Ann Reynolds) Political Emotions (Routledge, 2010). She has been coeditor, with Annamarie Jagose, of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. She currently has two books in progress: Feeling My Way Through the Archives: A Journey in Queer Method and How to Live in A Body: A Survival Guide for Troubled Times.
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