Andrea McDonnell is a media scholar and author whose work examines the production, content, and audience reception of popular media and American celebrity culture. Her research seeks to understand the ways in which audiences engage, take pleasure in, and make sense of celebrity gossip across media platforms, including print, television, and social media.

Campus community only, please.

Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne and Arapaho Nation) is an acclaimed multidisciplinary artist whose work has long advocated for recognition of historic and ongoing forms of oppression of Indigenous peoples in the US and globally. 

This exhibition of contemporary art explores the psychological, physical, and emotional realities encountered by women and people assigned female at birth in the years leading up to, during, and after fertility. Artists Krista Franklin and Joanne Leonard will be in conversation with exhibition curators Karen Irvine and Kristin Taylor.

A lecture by Sharla Alegria, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto, whose research examines inequalities that persist when individuals and organizations embrace principles of equity.

In this two-part lecture, Mindy Seu will present a performative reading of the Cyberfeminism Index followed by Celine Wong Katzman’s introduction to building intersectional feminist, archival, and curatorial frameworks in the contemporary art world.

An exhibition by Kütral Vargas Huaiquimilla. Performance and opening reception February 22.

Professor Miles P. Grier (Queens College, CUNY and CUNY Graduate Center) offers a lecture based on his research on the transatlantic performance history of Shakespeare’s Othello, Shakespeare and early modern science, and Black Atlantic responses from Wheatley to Toni Morrison.

Campus community only, please.

Strain, Professor of Film and the Moving Image at Wesleyan University, will lecture on her experience as a documentary filmmaker of color and woman dedicated to representing issues of race and history in the United States.

A radical, dynamic, and engaging conversation with Amber Starks about Black and Native solidarity and kinship as Black, Native, and Afro-Indigenous kin move from survivance to thrivance and futurity.

Award-winning author Jennine Capó Crucet will read from her novel Make Your Home Among Strangers. Q&A and book signing to follow.

Deepa Anappara and Taymour Soomro, editors of the new essay collection Letters to a Writer of Color, will talk about race and craft with a multidisciplinary panel of Vassar faculty.

An award-winning environmental activist will share her story of how her community holds the city of Los Angeles accountable for breaching the Environmental Quality Act.

A Matthew Vassar Lecture, panel discussion, and workshops by syndicated Black cartoonist and children’s book illustrator Jerry Craft, who will discuss his graphic novel New Kid—and how the text has been weaponized and banned from some libraries and classrooms across the country.

In this talk, author Koa Beck will examine the history of feminism, from the true mission of the suffragists to the rise of corporate feminism—paying careful attention to the ways capitalism and racism have functioned as structuring forces within dominant feminist culture.

A lecture by Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, Associate Professor of English Education at Teachers College, Columbia University.