Dr. Marie Grace Brown will give the keynote address for Women’s History Month titled “Body Movements: Positioning Sudanese Women in an Age of Empire” on Wednesday, March 14, 2018 at 7 p.m. in the Flint Hills/Kanza rooms of the ESU Memorial Union.
Dr. Brown is a cultural historian of the modern Middle East with a special interest in questions of gender, empire, and the body as historical text. Her award-winning first book, “Khartoum at Night: Fashion and Body Politics in Imperial Sudan,” argues that Sudanese women used their bodies to mark and make meaning of the shifting social and political systems of imperial rule. Her current research examines the romantic behaviors of British women in Sudan in the first half of the twentieth century and posits that the public roles of female imperialists were accented and complicated by private desires.
Marie Grace Brown earned her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. She is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Kansas, where she teaches courses on the broadly defined Middle East. She also works with the Kansas Africa Study Center and the Center for Global and International Studies.
Before her career in academia, Brown worked at a nonprofit organization, providing legal assistance to immigrant women fleeing gender-based violence. Her work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the American Association of University Women, the Social Science Research Council, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.
The presentation is free and open to all students and the Emporia community.
The event is sponsored by the Ethnic and Gender Studies Program and the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies.