Carole S. Vance, an anthropologist whose work deals with sexuality, human rights, and health, will give the annual Craig Owens Memorial Lecture at the University of Rochester at 4 p.m. Friday, Dec. 1, in the Welles-Brown Room of Rush Rhees Library on the University's River Campus. The talk is free and open to the public.
Vance is associate clinical professor of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and the director of the Program for the Study of Sexuality, Gender, Health, and Human Rights, a Rockefeller Foundation postdoctoral residency program. It is designed to encourage new scholarship about sexuality and rights, and facilitate conversations between academics, advocates, and activists in the United States and internationally.
"Carole's ability to move outward from her own academic disciplines—anthropology and public health—and cross into my own area of specialization, contemporary art—is exemplary of the way Carole does interdisciplinary," said Douglas Crimp, the Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History at the University of Rochester. He praised her work when she delivered the 2005 Kessler Lecture in New York last year.
"Not only does Carole bridge the disciplines in her own work on sex, but she also has a long and distinguished career of making it possible for others to do so," Crimp said.
Vance's Rochester lecture will be drawn from her current work on integrating sexuality with human rights frameworks and claims. It is titled " 'Juanita/Svetlana/Geeta' Is Crying: Melodrama, Human Rights, and Anti-Trafficking Interventions."
She is the author of numerous articles about sexuality, as well as the editor of Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (Routledge, 1984) and other books. Vance also has written about controversies over female sexuality, sexual imagery, sexual panics, and sexuality and science.
The Owens lecture was created in memory of Craig Owens, who died of complications resulting from AIDS in 1990. He taught in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Rochester from 1988 to 1990, and was one of the founders of the doctoral program in Visual and Cultural Studies.
For more information, contact (585) 275-7451.