We would like to invite you to an upcoming event hosted by the Gender/Sexuality Research Group’s Student Chapter!

A lecture given by a Fulbright Scholar, Doctor Rebecca C. Hains (Salem State
University), titled

Marketing Barbie’s “Curvy New Body”: Mattel’s Fashionistas Line and its Legacy Brand Politics

June 6, 2024, 6 pm, room 2.118

Where?

American Studies Center
Dobra 55, room 2.118
(The building features some mobility accommodations: ramp and lift)

 

What?

During this lecture, you will have the pleasure of listening to Dr. Hains’s exploration of Barbie from the feminist perspective, the history of Barbie’s body type, and the feminist critique around it. The talk will also discuss the PR surrounding the “Curvy” Barbies’ release, a topic that has sparked many intense debates.

We encourage you to visit the Student Chapter’s social media to access a chapter from Dr. Hains’s edited collection, The Marketing of Children’s Toys. This is a great supplement to the upcoming lecture!

Check out Student Chapter’s Facebook!

And Instagram!

Who?

Rebecca C. Hains, Ph.D., is a professor of media and communication at Salem State University, where she researches children’s media culture from a critical/cultural studies perspective. Hains authored the books Growing Up With Girl Power: Girlhood on Screen and in Everyday Life (Peter Lang, 2012) and The Princess Problem: Guiding Our Girls Through the Princess-Obsessed Years(Sourcebooks, 2014) and has contributed to anthologies such as 20 Questions About Youth and Media (Peter Lang, 2018) and Deconstructing Dolls: Girlhoods and the Meanings of Play (Berghahn Books, 2022). She has collaboratively edited several collections, including Cultural Studies of LEGO (Palgrave, 2019) and The Marketing of Children’s Toys(Palgrave, 2021), and has published in various journals, including Women’s Studies in Communication and Girlhood Studies. She serves on the editorial board of The Journal of Children and Media and is a 2023-2024 Fulbright Scholar to the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland.

American Studies Colloquium Series

January 16: Painting in Total Darkness: Blindness as the Medium for Vision

January 4, 2025

We are delighted to invite you to the last lecture of the American Studies Colloquium Series in the 2024/2025 Fall semester! Touching on various processes, materials, histories, and methodologies of making, Stephen Proski’s lecture will show how blindness can function as a unique lens of perception, particularly as it relates to the expanded field of painting.

Year 2024/2025

January 9: It’s a True Story – It Happened to a Friend of a Friend (online)’: Urban Legends and Television in the Contemporary Era

December 31, 2024

Join us for the first Weird TV lecture in 2025! Whether centering talk programming, news television, or fictionalised accounts, urban legends nest themselves in the minds of viewers, propagating, and ultimately regressively metamorphosing & returning to oral tradition, shared from viewer to non-viewer to non-viewer, so on and so forth. The oral links which are core to the Urban Legend are recreated anew. While found near universally across televisual programming, our interest rests in the anthology format television has adopted. The stories told are familiar, but not entirely static. The narrative transaction shifts and subsumes itself to the socio-cultural changes. Each technological revolution in communication ripples and renders the narrativization of urban legends transposed onto television. It is in this vein that we will discuss the conceptualisation of the Urban Legend, the televisual forms it has taken, and its existence within the internet era.

American Studies Colloquium Series

December 19: Between The Mundane and the Heroic: Vietnamese Presence in State Socialist Poland

December 19, 2024

We are delighted to invite you to the fifth lecture of the American Studies Colloquium Series in the 2024/2025 Fall semester! This talk will examine the depictions of the (North) Vietnamese as freedom fighters within the context of the state socialist public sphere and the everyday life of Vietnamese students in Poland across generations. From idealized wartime reportages to mixed-race couples, the Vietnamese presence was marked by a multifaceted experience of adaptation, challenges, opportunities, and dynamic, interactive bonds with Polish society. This history continues to exert a profound influence on the contemporary Vietnamese diaspora and Polish-Vietnamese relationships.

Year 2024/2025

December 18: The Trump Transition – What is New and What is Not

December 18, 2024

Leadership Research Groupis inviting all those who would like to put the Trump transition to a presidential scholarship context and better understand the Trump transition decisions, the prospects for the future in domestic and foreign policy areas they bring, and the impact that Trump leadership may have on the political scene in Washington to a talk followed by a Q&A session by Professor Stephen Farnsworth.

Year 2024/2025

December 17: We Want Change NOW! The Feminist Manifesto in Theory and Practice

December 17, 2024

During the workshop “We Want Change NOW! The Feminist Manifesto in Theory and Practice”, Aleksandra Julia Malinowska, a doctoral candidate at the University of Warsaw,will delve into the history of feminist manifestos and their pivotal role in the women’s movement in the United States. We’ll explore how activists of the second wave of feminism used grassroots publications to raise awareness, voice the demands of emerging women’s groups, and build communication networks between organizations spread across the country. Together, we’ll analyze the literary techniques that make the manifesto genre a powerful tool for inspiring activist mobilization beyond the pages of the text.