Participants
October 2022 Conference
Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers
Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley where she specializes in African-American history, women’s and gender history, and the history of American slavery. She is also the Chancellor’s Professor of History (2021-2024). She is the author of They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, which won the 2020 Harriet Tubman Prize from the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery, the 2020 Julia Cherry Spruill Prize from the Southern Association for Women’s Historians, the Southern Historical Association’s 2020 Charles S. Sydnor Award, the 2020 Best Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, and the 2020 Merle Curti Prize from the Organization of American Historians. Jones-Rogers is also the first African-American and the third woman to win the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History since the award’s inception in 1980.
“Wet Nurse For Sale or Hire:”
White Women, Wet Nursing, and Enslaved Mothers’ Invisible Labor in the American Slave Market
Keynote Talk
Roundtable on Breastfeeding and Lactation Scholarship Across Discipline: Retrospective and New Directions
Ifeyinwa Asiodu
Ifeyinwa Asiodu is an Associate Professor at the University of California, San Francisco School of Nursing; an Investigator with the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health and Affiliated Faculty with the Center for Health Equity. Dr. Asiodu is a respected public health nurse, lactation consultant, and researcher, with over 19 years of nursing experience. Her clinical expertise is in Critical Care, Lactation, and Public Health, specifically Maternal and Child Health populations and programs. Dr. Asiodu’s work is focused on identifying and addressing the impact of social and structural determinants of health during the reproductive life course, with a specific focus on human milk feeding, lactation support, contraception, and maternity care practices. She also leads the MILK Research Lab at UCSF. Dr. Asiodu received her BSN from the University of Southern California, MS and PhD from UCSF School of Nursing and completed postdoctoral work at the University of Illinois, at Chicago.
Linda Blum
Linda Blum is a qualitative sociologist whose interests include: contradictions in contemporary gender relations; disability, health, and the body; and families, work, inequality and intersectionality. She has long studied how gender ideologies in the United States measure women against each other, as respectable or disreputable, fit or unfit, in ways that reinforce class and race inequality and individualize responsibility for larger structural inequality. In addition to articles and chapters, she is the author of Between Feminism and Labor: The Significance of the Comparable Worth Movement (1991, University of California Press); At the Breast: Ideologies of Breastfeeding and Motherhood in the Contemporary United States (1999, Beacon); and Raising Generation Rx: Mothering Kids with Invisible Disabilities in an Age of Inequality (2015, NYU Press).
Jennifer L. Borda
Jennifer L. Borda (Ph.D. Penn State) is Professor of Communication at the University of New Hampshire specializing in rhetoric, feminist studies, and democratic deliberation. She is author of Women Labor Activists in the Movies: Nine Depictions of Workplace Organizers, 1954-2005 (McFarland Publishers, 2010) and co-editor of The Motherhood Business: Consumption, Communication, and Privilege (University of Alabama Press, 2015). Her essays have been published in various academic journals, including Quarterly Journal of Speech, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Feminist Media Studies, and Women’s Studies in Communication. Recent scholarship focuses on how discourse and ideologies about women, work, motherhood, and identity have been constructed and challenged through the mass media and online deliberation. As a past Fellow on the NSF-funded ADVANCE IT grant addressing career-life balance issues and member of UNH’s President’s Commission on the Status of Women, she has consistently advocated for extending benefits for working parents.
Courtney Jung
Courtney Jung is a professor in the department of Political Science and the George Ignatieff Chair in Peace and Conflict Studies at The Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at University of Toronto. Her most recent book, Lactivism: how feminists and fundamentalists, hippies and yuppies, and physicians and politicians made breastfeeding big business and bad politics, was widely reviewed and discussed. It was recently translated into Chinese and published in China, where it has also become a widely reported media topic.
Rachel Trubowitz
Rachel Trubowitz is Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. She is the author of Nation and Nurture in Seventeenth-Century Literature (OUP, 2012). She has two books in progress: Milton’s Moving Bodies, co-edited with Marissa Greenberg (in the review process at Northwestern UP; and Milton and Mathematics (under review at Cambridge UP).
Building Supportive Communities for New Parents: A Workshop With Practitioners Around the Seacoast
Stephanie Crawford
Stephanie Crawford is a Boston Public School Kindergarten teacher with a masters from Lesley University in Moderate Disabilities. She is the owner of Belle Joie Doula services and is an active community organizer, trainer, advocate and consultant. Stephanie founded the non-profit Propa City Community Outreach in 2011 to assist mothers impacted by pregnancy loss along with their families and friends. She founded the organization after her son Simeon Jelani was stillborn on February 7, 2011. She named the Grief Support program Team Simeon in honor of her son and gave it the tagline “Because He STILL was BORN”. The success of this initiative led to its expansion to include people of all ages being trained to advocate for positive healing in themselves and in their communities. Stephanie is the mother of baby angel Simeon and rainbow baby Amani. She is the godmother to 18 beautiful children, a daughter, granddaughter, sister, aunt, cousin and friend. She has made it her mission to be a light to souls who feel lost using the purpose and skills that God has given her.
Shilpa Darivemula
Shilpa Darivemula began training in Kuchipudi at the age of 8 with Ms. Sasikala Penumarthi at the Academy of Kuchipudi Dance and performed her solo debut recital—her Rangapravesham—in 2011 with Ms. Anuradha Nehru and Mr. Kishore Mosalikanti at the Kalanidhi Dance school. She was the past recipient of a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to study the connection between traditional dance cultures of the world and their healing systems and the ASTMH Kean Fellowship to study cervical cancer in Peru. She served as an Artist in Residence for the American Medical Women’s Association, previous director of the AMWA Dance, Theater, and Medicine Task Force, and founder of the Reimagining Medicine Festival. She currently serves as the founder/Artistic Director of the Aseemkala Initiative (www.aseemkala.org)–an organization that addresses health justice and equity through transformative dance narratives and research. Her passion is blending her work as an OBGYN into performance arts pieces for critical reflection by all who experience the injustices of the healthcare system.
Ananda Lowe
Ananda Lowe is the creator of A Mind/Body Approach to Nursing. She is the Director of Boston Doula Circle, and co-author of The Doula Guide to Birth: Secrets Every Pregnant Woman Should Know (Penguin Random House). She has been a doula since 1995 and she became a Certified Lactation Counselor in 2001.
Krista Maltais
Krista Maltais is one of three Advanced Postpartum Doulas and one of fifteen Postpartum Doula Trainers with DONA International as well as an Advanced Lactation Counselor with the Academy of Lactation Policy and Practice. She is a UNH Alumni and holds a BS in Family Studies, specializing in family development and dynamics. In 2018, Krista Founded Relief Parenting Respite and Resource Center, the first and only parenting center of its kind, where she oversees the support of hundreds of families each month.
Janet Perkins-Howland
Janet Perkins-Howland (she, her) has been working as an obstetrician on the Seacoast since 1998. Her work passions are shared decision making, true informed consent, reproductive justice, and choice.
Isha Parupudi
Isha Parupudi is a Bharatanatyam and Kuchipudi dancer from Houston and is a student of Ms. Rathna Kumar, Ms. Rama Vaidhyanathan and Ms. Bala Kondalaro in India. She is a National YoungArts Finalist, Texas Young Master, and US Presidential Scholar for the Arts and has performed at several venues, including Jacob’s Pillow Festival, Erasing Borders, United Nations, and World Government Summit. Her current choreographic interests focus on trauma healing, mental health, and social justice through dance, while studying at Columbia University with a goal of pursuing law school in the future. She served as an Aseemkala Choreography Fellow and now is on the Board of Directors. Her work today is based on her time with Aseemkala.
Artist Conversation and Reception: Birthing Bodies/Birthing Art
Tirtzah Bassel
Tirtzah Bassel is an Israeli artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Her drawings, paintings and site-responsive installations explore the relationships between power and space, and the permeable borders between public and private domains. She is a faculty member in the Visual and Critical Studies Department at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and a resident artist in the Chashama Workspace Program in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Canon in Drag, one of her recent projects, imagines a fictional Western art canon that evolved outside of the patriarchy. It includes a series of paintings in the style of iconic works, subverted through gender flipping and altered narratives.
Shilpa Darivemula
Shilpa Darivemula began training in Kuchipudi at the age of 8 with Ms. Sasikala Penumarthi at the Academy of Kuchipudi Dance and performed her solo debut recital—her Rangapravesham—in 2011 with Ms. Anuradha Nehru and Mr. Kishore Mosalikanti at the Kalanidhi Dance school. She was the past recipient of a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to study the connection between traditional dance cultures of the world and their healing systems and the ASTMH Kean Fellowship to study cervical cancer in Peru. She served as an Artist in Residence for the American Medical Women’s Association, previous director of the AMWA Dance, Theater, and Medicine Task Force, and founder of the Reimagining Medicine Festival. She currently serves as the founder/Artistic Director of the Aseemkala Initiative (www.aseemkala.org)–an organization that addresses health justice and equity through transformative dance narratives and research. Her passion is blending her work as an OBGYN into performance arts pieces for critical reflection by all who experience the injustices of the healthcare system.
Isha Parupudi
Isha Parupudi is a Bharatanatyam and Kuchipudi dancer from Houston and is a student of Ms. Rathna Kumar, Ms. Rama Vaidhyanathan and Ms. Bala Kondalaro in India. She is a National YoungArts Finalist, Texas Young Master, and US Presidential Scholar for the Arts and has performed at several venues, including Jacob’s Pillow Festival, Erasing Borders, United Nations, and World Government Summit. Her current choreographic interests focus on trauma healing, mental health, and social justice through dance, while studying at Columbia University with a goal of pursuing law school in the future. She served as an Aseemkala Choreography Fellow and now is on the Board of Directors. Her work today is based on her time with Aseemkala.
Katie Umans
Katie Umans is the Assistant Director of the UNH Center for the Humanities, parent of two young children, and a poet. Her poetry has been featured in many journals over the years and right now can be found in the newest issues of The Kenyon Review and RHINO. A collection of poems, Flock Book (winner of the St. Lawrence Book Award) was published by Black Lawrence Press in 2012. She has an MFA from the University of Michigan and was the Ruth and Jay C. Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing 2005–2006.
Laure Barillas
Laure Barillas is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and French at UNH. She specializes in feminist theory and medical humanities. Her current research project focuses on powerlessness and democracy.
Milky Mothers: Pure and Impure
Chair and Respondent
Amy Boylan
Amy Boylan is Associate Professor of Italian Studies and a Core Faculty member of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of New Hampshire. Her research and teaching interests include memory studies and commemorative practices, nationalism and national identity, nine-teenth- and early-twentieth-century women writers, early Italian cinema, and migration studies. She has published essays on historical and contemporary memorials in Italy, literature and poetry of the First World War, nationalist propaganda and anti-war activism, representations of food and foodways in Italian cinema, and First World War–era Italian cinema. Her current project, entitled The Ethics of Sacrifice and the Crisis of Childhood in Early Italian Cinema will focus on motherhood, childhood and citizenship in Italian silent cinema.
Nursing as Private, Nursing as Public: Italy, a Case Study
Chair and Respondent
Danielle Callegari
Danielle Callegari (Ph.D., New York University) is Assistant Professor in the Department of French and Italian at Dartmouth College and Councilor of the Dante Society of America. Her teaching and research focus on premodern Italian literature and food and beverage studies, and her first monograph, “Dante’s Gluttons: Food and Society from the Convivio to the Comedy,” was published with Amsterdam University Press in 2022. She is also the co-host of the Italian food and beverage culture podcast Gola and a writer at large for Wine Enthusiast, covering Tuscany and the Italian south.
Mother’s Milk: Nourishing Poets in Dante’s Purgatorio
Yujhán Claros
Yujhán Claros is a classically trained philologist and amateur theorist with special research interests in Greco-Roman Africanisms as well as Black Classicisms. Fields of expertise include hexameter (“epic”) poetry, Attic Tragedy, and the fiction of Toni Morrison. PhD (Classics) Columbia; BA Princeton.
“Quarts of Milk like Marble Statues”: Theorizing African-American Female Bodies and an Aesthetics of Black Womanhood in Toni Morrison’s Fiction
Simona Di Martino
Dr Simona Di Martino holds a PhD in Italian Studies from the University of Warwick (UK) and is currently a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies at the same institution. Simona’s interests span from the Gothic to folklore, and from children’s literature and motherhood to family novels. She organized and participated in several international conferences within and without the field of Italian Studies. Among her publications, a chapter on Gothic Poetry, part of the forthcoming edited volume Italian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, and one on Italian family novels dealing with Antonio Pennacchi’s Canale Mussolini (2020). Simona also published several peer-reviewed journal articles: the most recent one, entitled Wetnurses’ Tales: Female Rivalry, Motherhood Performativity and Bestiality in ‘La balia’ and ‘Il libretto rosso’ (2022), analyses the figure of the wetnurse in Pirandello’s short stories.
Quality Milk and Nursing Bodies in Luigi Pirandello’s Novelle per un anno
Diana Garvin
Diana Garvin is Assistant Professor of Italian at the University of Oregon. Her book., Feeding Fascism: The Politics of Women’s Food Work, was a Civil Eats Summer 2022 Reading list selection. Garvin writes and comments on the nexus of food history and reproductive healthcare for publications like The Washington Post (most recently, “Baby Formula Shortage Can Easily Get Swept Up in Political Currents”), Punch, and Saveur, and speaks on podcasts like Los Angeles Review of Books’ “55 Voices for Democracy” and Heritage Radio Network’s “A Taste of the Past.” Her research has been supported by Fulbright, Getty Library, Oxford University, Wolfsonian-FIU, Julia Child Foundation, CLIR Mellon, FLAS, AAUW, NWSA, AFS, APS, and other fellowships.
Breastfeeding in Political Propaganda from Fascism to Neo-Fascism
Gaia Gianni
Gaia Gianni is an assistant professor of Latin Literature in the Classics Department at Ohio State University. She received her Ph.D. from Brown University and taught at Tulane University and the University of Alabama. Her primary research interests are the development of fictive kinship in the Roman family, slavery and gender relations inside the household. She is currently working on her book, to be published by the University of Michigan Press, titled “Children in Ancient Rome: Social Relations and Familial Networks”.
Enslaved nurses and coercive allomaternal feeding in ancient Rome
Shannon McHugh
Shannon McHugh is Associate Professor of Italian and French at University of Massachusetts Boston. Her research focuses on Renaissance literature, especially poetry, and what it can tell us about the history of gender. Her publications include a translation of a pair of Italian convent chronicles, Writings on the Sisters of San Luca and Their Miraculous Madonna (with Danielle Callegari, 2015); an edited volume on Innovation in the Italian Counter-Reformation (with conference organizer Anna Wainwright, 2020); and the essay collection Vittoria Colonna: Poetry, Religion, Art, Impact (with Virginia Cox, 2021). Her monograph about male and female poets’ role in shaping early modern gender roles, entitled Petrarch and the Making of Gender in Renaissance Italy, is forthcoming with Amsterdam University Press in late 2022.
Orpheus lactans: Nursing in Renaissance Italian Lyric Poetry
Angelica Pesarini
Angelica Pesarini recently took up a new position as Assistant Professor in Race and Cultural Studies/ Race and Diaspora and Italian Studies at the University of Toronto. Her work seeks to expand the field of Black Italia focusing on dynamics of race, gender, identity, and citizenship. Interested in the racialization of the political discourse on immigration, she is among the co-founders of The Black Mediterranean Collective, which recently published The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders, and Citizenship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). Angelica is one of the authors of the anthology Future. Il domani narrato dalle voci di oggi curated by Igiaba Scego (Effequ, 2019) and she co-translated into Italian Undercommons. Fugitive Planning and Black Study (by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, published in Italy by Tamu and Archive Books, 2020) and Blues Legacies and Black feminism (Angela Y. Davis, Edizioni Alegre, 2022). Active in the Italian anti-racist movement, Angelica is investigating the impacts of BLM in Italy and she is currently writing a monograph on the use of race performativity in colonial and (post)colonial Italy.
Black Mothers, White Children: Expressions of Subaltern Identities in Fascist East Africa
Christopher T. Richards
Christopher T. Richards is a doctoral candidate in medieval art history at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. His research concerns image theory, the history of sexuality, and especially their intersection. His dissertation “Picturing Desire and Desiring Pictures: The Vernacular Manuscript Tradition” investigates fourteenth-century illuminated manuscripts of French poetry, in order to excavate a medieval queer theory of images. He is currently a fellow with the Georges Lurcy Charitable and Educational Trust and a Junior Fellow in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School, University of Virginia.
Milk and Paint: The Virgin Mother as a Problem of Representation
Paul Robertson
Paul Robertson is Senior Lecturer in Classics and Humanities at the University of New Hampshire. Receiving his Ph.D. from Brown University in Religious Studies (2013), he studies ancient Mediterranean thought and the nature of religion, with a particular interest in how ancient beliefs and practices continue to influence our own beliefs and practices today. Publications include books on comparative mythology and selfhood (2022), theorizing religion (2019), and the relationship between early Christianity and Greco-Roman moral philosophy (2016).
Milk as Substance and Symbol
Chair and Respondent
Nicole Ruane
Nicole Ruane is a Senior Lecturer at the University of New Hampshire where she teaches in the Humanities Program in the Department of Classics, Humanities and Italian Studies and is the Coordinator of the Religious Studies Program. She studies the Hebrew Bible, gender and religion and religion and violence. She is the author of Sacrifice and Gender in Biblical Law (Cambridge, 2013) as well as several articles and book chapters.
Milk as a “Natural Symbol” of Matrilineality in an Enigmatic Biblical Law
Samantha Katz Seal
Samantha Katz Seal is an associate professor of English and the Pamela Shulman Professor of European and Holocaust Studies at the University of New Hampshire. Her first book, Father Chaucer: Generating Authority in The Canterbury Tales, was published by Oxford University Press in 2019. Her work has appeared in The Chaucer Review, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Digital Philology, Speculum, Religion & Literature, The Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures, and several edited collections. She is currently at work on a new book, Before They Were White: Making Race Supremacies in Late Medieval England.
“Yeve the Child to Sowke:” On (Not) Breastfeeding the Infant in Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale
Jennifer Stager
Jennifer Stager specializes in the art of the ancient Mediterranean and its afterlives. She is the author of Seeing Color in Classical Art: Theory, Practice, and Reception from Antiquity to the Present and, with Leila Easa, Public Feminism in Times of Crisis: From Sappho’s Fragments to Viral Hashtags.
The Violence of Care: women enslaved as wet nurses in ancient Greece
Sasha Turner
Sasha Turner is Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing and Slavery in Jamaica which examines the struggles for control over biological reproduction and how central childbearing was to the organization of plantation work, the care of slaves, and the development of their culture. Her work has appeared in academic journals such as Slavey and Abolition and the Journal of Women’s History, and on popular platforms such as Black Perspectives. Dr. Turner has received many awards for her work, including from, the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, the Southern Association of Women Historians, the African American Intellectual History Society, Association of Black Women Historians, and North American Conference on British Studies. She is working on a new project on slavery and emotions.