Sears Lecture Series to present free women's rights lecture in April
March 25, 2015
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – The Sears Lecture Series and the Purdue University Department of Political Science will present "Women's Rights Have No Country: National Transnational and International Politics of Women's Human Rights" at 5:30 p.m. April 21 in the Purdue Memorial Union West Faculty Lounge. This lecture is free and open to the public.
2015 marks the 50th anniversary of Purdue's Department of Political Science. The lecture will feature four speakers from around the United States including:
* Lisa Baldez, "Defying Convention: U.S. Resistance to the UN Treaty on Women's Rights." Baldez is professor of government and Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Studies and director of the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning at Dartmouth College. She is the author of "Why Women Protest: Women's Movements in Chile" and "Defying Convention: US Resistance to the U.N. Treaty on Women's Rights." Her work on gender and politics in Latin America and in the U.S. has appeared in numerous journals, including Comparative Politics, Legislative Studies Quarterly and The Journal of Legal Studies. She is one of the founding editors, with Karen Beckwith, of Politics & Gender, the official journal of the Women and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association.
* Maylei Blackwell, "Women's Rights in Abya Yala: Continental Indigenous Women's Network since Beijing." Blackwell is an associate professor in Chicana and Chicano Studies and affiliated faculty in LGBT Studies and American Indian Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of "Chicana Power! Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement," which was a finalist for the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize and received an honorable mention by the Western Historical Association as one of the best books in Western women and gender history. Her publications have appeared in the U.S., Mexico and Brazil in journals such as Meridians, Signs, Journal of Latin American Studies, Desacatos and Revista Estudos Feministas.
* Amy Elman, "Human Rights in the European Union." Elman is professor of political science and the William Weber Chair of Social Science at Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She has published on the response of states and the European Union to issues of citizenship, migration, violence against women, sex discrimination, and anti-Semitism. Her most recent book, "The European Union, Anti-Semitism and the Politics of Denial," explores the conditions that precipitated the EU's efforts to stem anti-Semitism and she considers the consequences.
* Anne Marie Goetz, "Women's Rights Have No Country." Goetz, who joined the Center for Global Affairs at New York University as a clinical professor in 2014, is on sabbatical from U.N. Women, where she served since 2011 as chief adviser on women peace and security. She has worked at the United Nations since 2005 as chief adviser on governance, peace and security, for UNIFEM. Prior to joining UNIFEM in 2005, she was a professor of political science at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex where she had worked since 1991. She also served the United Nations Development Program in Chad and Guinea in the mid-1980s. While at the U.N. over the past decade, Goetz spearheaded initiatives to promote women's empowerment in the U.N.'s peace building work in post-conflict situations, to build peacekeepers' capacities to detect and prevent sexual violence in conflict, and to support women's organizations' efforts to participate in peace talks and post-conflict decision-making. She is the author of eight books on the subjects of gender, politics and policy in developing countries, and on accountability reforms.
The Sears Lecture Series is named for the late Purdue historian Louis Martin Sears, who was a faculty member in the then-joint Department of History and Political Science from 1920 until his retirement in 1956. Sears specialized in diplomatic history and biography and was the author of numerous books. Purdue's history and political science departments alternately produce the series bearing his name, in conjunction with Purdue Convocations.
Contact: Abby Eddy, Purdue Convocations director of marketing, 765-494-9712, aeeddy@purdue.edu
Note to Journalists: For publication-quality photographs of the four speakers, go to https://www.purdue.edu/convocations/press/
