People are welcome to bring a lunch and a curious mind to any one of the Brown Bag Series events this year, said Maggie Rehm, a lecturer in University of Idaho”s Women”s and Gender Studies interdisciplinary studies program.
Rehm said the Women”s and Gender Studies program and the Women”s Center host three to four Brown Bag events a semester.
“The study of women and the study of gender is kind of pushed aside in so many ways in our society or seen as less as important,” Rehm said. “”¦ I think it”s important that we are part of a larger conversation.”
Rehm
Rebekah MillerMacPhee, assistant director for programming at the Women”s Center, said these talks allow people to share research they have done on topics relating to women or gender. The events usually happen on the last Tuesday of the month, she said.
At the first Brown Bag event of the school year, Dilshani Sarathchandra, a professor in UI”s Sociology and Anthropology Department, led a discussion on how gender affects research, including how much funding a researcher will receive based on their demographics, MillerMacPhee said.
MillerMacPhee said UI History Professor Ellen Kittell gave the second Brown Bag Series lecture Oct. 27.
“Generally, one of the most important things about the Brown Bag is that it exposes the general population at large to the kind of research … those of us do,” Kittell said.
Kittell said many disciplines are interconnected, and many of these can be related to women”s and gender studies.
The Brown Bag series allows professors to share this aspect of their discipline with the broader community, Rehm said.
Kittell said professors do bring personal research into the classroom, but do not focus as fully on that aspect of the topic.
“It offers the rest of the community, the university community, to see what the rest of us are doing, and our particular take on gender,” Kittell said.
The Brown Bag Series allows professors and others to delve deeper into what they have explored, she said. She said her focus is on pre-modern history, and at the event she described women in the Middle Ages.
Rehm said Kittell is only one of the many diverse speakers they have hosted. She said the Brown Bag Series has featured an engineering professor, a master”s poetry student and a sociologist.
Rehm said there has also been a speaker from Egypt who discussed political theatre for Arab-American women, a Journalism and Mass Media assistant professor who spoke about Peter Dinklage and masculinity and a creative group known as BASK that discussed difficulties for women in the arts.
“[We] make sure that we invite speakers in from a variety of disciplines so that each year we have kind of a broad spectrum of people talking,” Rehm said.
There are usually three to four speakers every semester, she said. She said next semester Traci Craig, a professor in the Psychology and Communication Studies Department, will give a talk on tomboy identity and English graduate student Jessica McDermott will be discuss her thesis. There will be one or two more speakers who are not yet determined, she said.
“Bekah and I need to sit down and iron out the dates that are available for that,” Rehm said.
Rehm said the last event was well attended compared to most Brown Bag Series events, but is not sure why. She said the larger crowd may be due to better advertising or may have been a fluke. Either way, Rehm said she would love to see more people come to the events.
Nina Rydalch can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @NinaRobin7