Crystal Feimster & Danielle McGuire

To Gain Title to our Bodies: Race, Rape and Resistance from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement

“Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching” (Crystal Feimster)

Tuesday, April 12, 4pm, 206 Ingraham

“At the Dark End of the Street: Sexual Violence, Community Mobilization and the African American Freedom Struggle” (Danielle McGuire)

Wednesday, April 13, 4pm, 8417 Social Science

Open Seminar for Students, Faculty and Public

Thursday, April 14, 12:20pm, 8108 Social Science

Co-sponsored by the Afro-American Studies Department, Global Studies, and the History Department.

CRYSTAL N. FEIMSTER, a native of North Carolina, is an assistant professor in the Department of African American Studies and the American Studies Program at Yale University, where she teaches a range of courses in 19th and 20th century African American history, women’s history, and southern history. She has also taught at Boston College, UNC-Chapel Hill, and Princeton.  She earned her Masters Degree and Ph. D. in history from Princeton University and her BA in History and Women’s Studies from UNC-Chapel Hill.  Her publications include “A New Generation of Women Historians,” in Voices of Women Historians The Personal, the Political, and the Professional, edited by Nuper Chaudhuri and Eileen Boris (1999), “Not So Ivory:  African American Women Historians Creating Academic Communities,” in Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower, edited by Deborah Gray White (2008), and “General Benjamin Butler & the threat of sexual violence during the American Civil War,” Daedalus (American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Spring, 2009). She has most recently completed Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching  (Harvard University Press, 2009), which examines the roles of both black and white women in the politics of racial and sexual violence in the American South.  She is currently working on a project on rape and the American Civil War.

DANIELLE McGUIRE is the author of At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance-a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (Knopf, 2010). She is an Assistant Professor in the History Department at Wayne State University. Since receiving her PhD from Rutgers in 2007, she won numerous teaching and research awards. Her dissertation on sexualized racial violence and the African American freedom struggle received the 2008 Lerner Scott Prize for best dissertation in women’s history.  It was the runner-up for the Allen Nevins Prize, offered annually by the Society of American Historians for best-written dissertation on an American subject. McGuire is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians and has appeared on National Public Radio, BookTV (CSPAN) and dozens of local radio stations throughout the United States and Canada. Her essays have appeared on the Huffington Post and TheRoot.com.