Katherine Chandler‘s research examines the intersection of technology, media and politics through a range of scales and forms. Her first monograph, Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare, studies unmanned aircraft from 1936 – 1992. She asks how life and death are adjudicated through conditions organized as if control were ”unmanned.” She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley with a Designated Emphasis in New Media. Her work has been published in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies; Humanity: International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism and Development; Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience and qui parle: Critical Humanities and Social Science. Her second project, “Drone Publics,” is funded through Georgetown University’s competitive pilot grant program.

Brittany Meché is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersections of Environmental Studies, Security Studies, African/Diaspora Studies, and Science and Technology Studies. She currently serves as Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Williams College. Brittany earned her PhD in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley, and her work has been featured in Antipode, Society and Space, and in the edited volume A Research Agenda for Military Geographies. Brittany previously served as the Gaius Bolin Postdoctoral Fellow at Williams College and the McMillan-Stewart residential fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. She is completing a book manuscript about security interventions, climate change, and the afterlives of empire in the West African Sahel.

Eli Nelson (Kanien’kehá:ka) is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at Williams College and Director of Fellowships at the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies. He earned his PhD in the History of Science from Harvard University in 2018. Dr. Nelson’s current book manuscript, Sovereign Knowledge: The History of Native Science in the United States Empire, traces the history of Indigenous scientific knowledge production under settler colonial rule, what is frequently conceived of as “Native science,” across different national contexts and disciplines in the 19th and 20th centuries. In addition to the history of Native science, Dr. Nelson works on and teaches critical Indigenous theory, as well as Indigenous science fiction and futurism, and gender and sexuality.

Please note: Zoom details will be emailed to registrants on the day of the event.

The Center for the Study of Women and Society and Women Writing Women’s Lives present the Dorothy O. Helly Works-In-Progress Lecture “From Martha Graham to Eleanor Lansing Dulles: Women, Power, and Intrigue in Cold-War Berlin” by Victoria Phillips.

Victoria Phillips will introduce her work on a biography of Eleanor Lansing Dulles, a forgotten principle American participant in the rebuilding of war-torn Berlin. Dulles joined with Martha Graham to “fight the Kremlin” with culture in the Cold War hotspot, Berlin, 1957. Unlike, Graham, who proclaimed, “Center stage is wherever I am,” Dulles hid in plain sight in the U.S. State Department’s man’s world of mid-20th Century Cold War intrigue, intent on keeping an “invisible position.” Victoria Phillips will discuss finding memos obscured in international archives that Dulles wrote under assumed names, and concealed in “Top Secret” files penciled in tiny print, EDL; for Eleanor Lansing, “Eyes Only Dulles.” Phillips posits that Dulles has not yet been written about because this power-driven woman succeeded in masking her ambition and contributions, a necessity during 1950s Cold War culture.

Victoria Phillips, Ph.D. is the author of Martha Graham’s Cold War: The Dance of American Diplomacy (Oxford University Press, 2020), which uncovers the political life of Martha Graham and her particular brand of dance modernism as pro-American propaganda during the global Cold War. A Visiting Fellow in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics, Dr. Phillips is also the director of the Cold War Archival Research Project, History OnLine, and co-founder of the Global Biography Working Group. To learn more about Victoria Phillips’ works visit her website, www.victoria-phillips.global.

Co-sponsored with The Center for the Humanities, The Feminist Press, The Leon Levy Center for Biography, the Graduate Center MA Programs in Biography and Memoir and Liberal Studies, and the PhD Programs in History and English.

Please reach out to us at csws@gc.cuny.edu for questions or concerns.