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Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities 2024-25: New Books by Brooklyn College Faculty - Spring '25

Events in the New Books by Brooklyn College Faculty Series - Spring '25

Starved for Light: The Long Shadow of Rickets and Vitamin D Deficiency

a conversation with author Christian Warren and Professor Kathleen Axen

Wednesday, March 5, 2025; 6:00 PM to 7:15 PM

Online, Zoom pre-registration required.

Zoom link: https://brooklyn-cuny-edu.zoom.us/meeting/register/-vNSKl5KSfWDWKEL-QzIXQ

 

This event celebrates the publication BC History Professor Christian Warren’s Starved for Light. He is joined in a conversation on history and public health by BC Health and Nutrition Sciences Professor Kathleen Axen. Tracing the efforts to understand, prevent, and treat rickets—first with the traditional remedy of cod liver oil, then with the application of a breakthrough corrective, industrially produced vitamin D supplements—Warren ‘s book places the disease at the center of a riveting medical history, one alert to the ways society shapes our views on illness. Warren shows how physicians and public health advocates in the United States turned their attention to rickets among urban immigrants, both African Americans and southern Europeans; some concluded that the disease was linked to race, while others blamed poverty, sunless buildings and cities, or cultural preferences in diet and clothing. Sweeping and engaging, Starved for Light illuminates the social conditions underpinning our cures and our choices, helping us to see history’s echoes in contemporary prescriptions.


 

Writing for Remembrance, Release, and Resistance:

Teaching at the Intersection of Ethnic Studies & Creative Writing

a conversation with author Carla España, teachers, and students

Thursday, March 13, 2025; 11:00 AM to 12:15 PM

Tanger Auditorium, BC Library

 

This event features Brooklyn College students in Education and Puerto Rican and Latinx Studies, along with BC graduates in the K-12 classroom, in conversation with Brooklyn College Professor Carla España. In times when ethnic studies and literature by marginalized voices face censorship and removal from curricula, the experiences of people from the global majority must be amplified and integrated into all learning spaces. Dr. España will present her recent book, Narrative Writing With Latinx Teens: Testimonios, Texts, and Teaching, and lead a conversation on schooling, curriculum, ethnic studies, and teacher preparation.


 

Faux Feminism: Why We Fall For White Feminism and How We Can Stop?

a conversation with author Serene Khader joined by students Cindy Lin and Eugene Zeus

Tuesday, March 18, 2025; 6:00 PM to 7:15 PM

Online, Zoom pre-registration required: https://brooklyn-cuny-edu.zoom.us/meeting/register/mHGt67v_TtWx5gwmJ_ZTkw

 

What is white feminism and what is the alternative? Join us for a discussion between Philosophy Professor Serene Khader and Brooklyn College students Eugene Zeus and Cindy Lin on Khader’s recent book Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop (Beacon 2024).


 

Mobility, Gender, and Shifting Paradigms of Work in Nairobi, Kenya

with Professors Meghan Ference and Tatiana Thieme

Thursday, March 20, 2025; 6:00 PM to 7:15 PM

Online: Zoom pre-registration required. Zoom link: https://brooklyn-cuny-edu.zoom.us/meeting/register/JehLkYCoTxWjI1-CmoQC4Q

 

This event is a celebration of BC Anthropology Professor Meghan Ference’s recent book Matatu Work: Gender, Labor and Mobility in Nairobi. The event will center a conversation about the changing nature of informal work and the impacts on workers in Kenya between two urban ethnographers who have worked in Kenya for the past two decades and have recently published monographs on work and the hustle economy in Nairobi. They will discuss shifting regimes of labor regarding gender, the role of technology in transforming work and the nature of the hustle economy in Africa and around the world. Meghan Ference is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Brooklyn College, CUNY, and Tatiana Thieme is an Associate Professor of Human Geography at University College London. Ference’s Matatu Work was recently published with James Currey Press and Thieme's book Hustle Urbanism: Making Life Work in Nairobi is forthcoming from Minnesota University Press.


 

King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Life of Struggle Outside the South

a conversation with author Jeanne Theoharis and researchers David Rondeau, Tyra Smart, and Gabrielle White

Tuesday, April 22, 2025; 12:30 to 2:00 PM

Woody Tanger Auditorium, Brooklyn College Library

 

The Martin Luther King Jr. of popular memory vanquished Jim Crow in the South. But in this myth-shattering book, Jeanne Theoharis argues that King’s time in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago was at the heart of his campaign for racial justice. King of the North follows the Kings as they come of age in school in the North and as he crisscrosses the country from the Northeast to the West Coast, challenging school segregation, police brutality, housing segregation, and job discrimination. For these efforts, he was relentlessly attacked by white liberals, the federal government and the national media. Join us on for a conversation on King of the North, particularly focused on how the nation's flagship print media covered King's work outside the South with Jeanne Theoharis and three of her research assistants for the book, Brooklyn College graduates David Rondeau, Tyra Smart and Gabrielle White who helped her document this media story.


 

The Cult of CrossFit: Christianity and the American Exercise Phenomenon

a conversation with author Katie Rose Hejtmanek and Professor Lauren Mancia

Monday, April 21, 2025; 6:00 to 7:15 PM

Online: Zoom pre-registration required. Zoom link: https://brooklyn-cuny-edu.zoom.us/meeting/register/2Bcns6zTT7OBos05CMZNmw

 

This event celebrates the publication of Anthropology Professor Katie Rose Hejtmanek ‘s The Cult of CrossFit. She will be joined in conversation Lauren Mancia, Professor of History at Brooklyn College and Professor of Medieval Studies at The Graduate Center. We all have that one friend who's a little too into CrossFit. They talk about it all the time, and the way they describe it, you'd think they were describing a cult. Hejtmanek research spans the US and six other continents to understand what makes certain people feel so devoted to CrossFit. Despite presenting itself as a secular space, Hejtmanek argues that CrossFit is deeply intertwined with American Christian values. She makes the case that the Christianity that shapes CrossFit is the same kind of Christianity that shapes much of America, usually in ways we do not even notice.

 


 

Stories on Disability Through Our Voices: Born This Way

a conversation between author Yoon Joo Lee and Professor David J. Connor

Wednesday, April 30, 2025; 2:15 to 3:30 PM

Woody Tanger Auditorium, Brooklyn College Library

 

This event celebrates the publication of Stories on Disability Through Our Voices: Born This Way (Routledge, 2025), the first solo book by Yoon Joo Lee, Associate Professor of Childhood, Bilingual, and Special Education at BC. Lee will be joined by colleague David J. Connor Professor Emeritus at Hunter College. The book explores the lived experiences of Korean and Korean American women with visible disabilities in South Korea and the U.S. Drawing upon the work of scholars in disability studies in education and feminist disability studies, it challenges readers to (re)consider their own misconceptions and assumptions about disability and reconceptualize their understanding of diversity. Lee’s work is distinguished by her ability to connect personally with the women she interviews, sharing unique yet overlapping experiences as a woman with visible disabilities. Part of the Routledge Book Series Autocritical Disability Studies, the book uses autoethnography to center the researcher’s personal experiences throughout the process. Lee and Connor will engage in a conversation around values of foregrounding voices of individuals with disabilities in various forms of research.