SU scholar to give Coburn talk

Syracuse University scholar Chandra Talpade Mohanty will present the 2014 Karen Levin Coburn ’63 Lecture at 8 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 25, in Gannett Auditorium of Palamountain Hall.

Titled “Transnational Feminist Dialogues on Neoliberalism and Radical Praxis,” the lecture is sponsored by Skidmore’s Gender Studies Program. Admission is free and open to the public.

Mohanty is distinguished professor of women’s and gender studies and dean’s professor of the humanities at Syracuse University. Her work focuses on transnational feminist theory, anti-capitalist feminist practices, anti-racist education, and the politics of knowledge. She is the author of Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Duke University Press, 2003 and Zubaan Books, India, 2004) and co-editor of Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Indiana University Press, 1991), Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures (Routledge, 1997), Feminism and War: Confronting U.S. Imperialism (Zed Press, 2008), and The Sage Handbook on Identities (co-edited with Margaret Wetherell, 2010). Her work has been translated into Arabic, German, Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish, Farsi, Chinese, Russian, Swedish, Thai, Korean, Turkish, Slovenian, Hindi, and Japanese.  

She is a member of the advisory boards of Signs, A Journal of Women in Culture and Society; Transformations, The Journal of Inclusive PedagogyandScholarship; Feminist Africa (South Africa), Asian Women (Korea), Feminist Economics, and the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies.

She is a steering committee member of the Municipal Services Project, a transnational research and advocacy group focused on alternatives to privatization in the global south, a founding member of the Democratizing Knowledge Collective at Syracuse University, and coordinating team member of the Future of Minority Studies Research Project.. She has worked with three grassroots community organizations: Grassroots Leadership of North Carolina, Center for Immigrant Families in New York City, and Awareness, Orissa, India, and was a member of the “Indigenous and Women of Color Solidarity delegation to Palestine” in June 2011. 

Mohanty served as a consultant/evaluator for the Association of American Colleges and Universities, the Ford Foundation, and UN Women.  She is series editor of  “Comparative Feminist Studies” for Palgrave/Macmillan.

A native of Mumbai, India, Mohanty is an honors graduate of the University of Delhi in India. She earned master’s and doctoral degrees at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and has received honorary degrees from Lund University in Sweden and the College of Wooster in Ohio.

The Coburn Lecture honors Karen Levin Coburn, a 1963 Skidmore graduate who is co-author of the well-known book Letting Go:  A Parent’s Guide to Understanding the College Years. The lecture was established in 2005 to enrich to raise the level of conversations about gender studies on campus.