Homeland Insecurity:
Civil Liberties, Repression, and Citizenship
in the 1950s
a conference
Thursday January 23, 2003-Sunday January 26, 2003
Smith College ~ Northampton, Massachusetts

PARTICIPANT BIOS: 

Elisabeth Armstrong has been an assistant professor of women’s studies at Smith College since 2001. Her current research focuses on how globalization affects women’s political movements. For the past ten years, she has worked alongside the All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA) to record their neighborhood, state-based and nation-wide campaigns for women’s rights in the face of market liberalization policies propelled by the IMF/World Bank. Her first book Retreat from Organization: U.S. Feminism Reconceptualized was published in 2002.

Lauren Berlant, professor of English, gender studies and the humanities at the University of Chicago, works on the nation as an affect world and citizenship as a mode of public (normative, juridical, affective) subjectivity, focusing especially on the United States. She writes across the nineteenth century to the present, looking at the rise of intimacy as the scene for the political, focusing particularly on rhetorics of sentimentality and trauma as the affects that bind national strangers to each other. Her publications include The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship, (1997), The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life, (1991), “Intimacy: A Special Issue,” editor, Critical Inquiry, Winter 1998, and “Sex in Public,” co-author with Michael Warner, Critical Inquiry, Winter 1998.

Susan C. Bourque, provost and dean of the faculty at Smith, is also the Esther Booth Wiley professor of government at Smith College. Prior to becoming provost she served as the dean for academic development, chair of the government department and director of the Smith Project on Women and Social Change. Professor Bourque’s research focuses on a wide range of political issues in Latin America and the United States. Her most recent book is Women on Power: Leadership Reconsidered (2001), co-edited with Sue J.M. Freeman and Christine M. Shelton. Her other books include: The Politics of Women’s Education: Perspectives from Asia, Africa and Latin America (1993), co-edited with Jill Ker Conway; Learning About Women: Gender, Politics and Power (1989), co-edited with Jill Ker Conway and Joan Wallach Scott; Women Living Change: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (1995), co-edited with Donna Robinson Divine, and Women of the Andes: Patriarchy and Social Change in Two Peruvian Towns (1981). Women of the Andes was awarded the Alice and Edith Hamilton Prize.

Stacy L. Braukman is assistant editor for Notable American Women, volume 5, and works at the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Her work traces the migration of McCarthyism to the South in the mid-1950s. Focusing on an anticommunist investigating committee in Florida, she argues that new racialized and sexualized meanings of subversion not only shaped the domestic anticommunist agenda through the 1960s but also set the stage for the resurgence of conservatism (the “New Right”) in the 1970s. Her most recent article is “‘Nothing Else Matters But Sex’: Cold War Narratives of Deviance and the Search for Lesbian Teachers in Florida, 1959-1963” in Feminist Studies (Fall 2001).

Carol T. Christ became the tenth president of Smith College in June 2002. She graduated from Douglass College with high honors and went on to Yale University, where she received the Ph.D. in English. In 1970, Christ joined the English faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. She was chair of her department from 1985 until 1988 when she entered the university’s administration, serving first as dean of humanities and later as provost and dean of the College of Letters and Sciences. In 1994, Christ was appointed vice chancellor and provost and later became executive vice chancellor. Christ was the highest-ranking female administrator at Berkeley until she returned to full-time teaching in 2000. Throughout her administrative career, Christ has maintained an active program of teaching and research. Her books include The Finer Optic: The Aesthetic of Particularity in Victorian Poetry and Victorian and Modern Poetics. She also edited a Norton Critical Edition of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and co-edited the Norton Anthology of English Literature and Victorian Literature and The Victorian Visual Imagination.

Henri Cole, who has been hailed by Harold Bloom as “a central poet of his generation,” declares that “to write what is human” is his primary goal. Born in Fukuoka, Japan to American parents, he received his B.A. from the College of William and Mary in 1978, his M.A. from the University of Wisconsin (Milwaukee) in 1980, and his M.F.A. from Columbia University in 1982. From 1982 to 1988, he served as the executive director of the Academy of American Poets. He has taught at Columbia, Reed, Yale, Harvard, and Brandeis and has received many honors and awards, including the Rome Fellowship in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Cole’s books of poetry include The Zoo Wheel of Knowledge (1989), The Look of Things (1994), and The Visible Man (1998). Middle Earth, forthcoming, will be his fifth collection. He is currently the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer in Residence at Smith College. Some of his poems are included on the web page for the Smith College Poetry Center: https://www.smith.edu/poetrycenter . 

Robert J. Corber is associate professor of lesbian and gay studies in the program on women, gender, and sexuality at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. His work focuses on the relationship between homophobia and nationalism in the Cold War era. His books include: Homosexuality in Cold War America: Resistance and the Crisis of Masculinity (1997), and In the Name of National Security: Hitchcock, Homophobia, and the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar America (1993). He co-edited Queer Studies: An Interdisciplinary Reader with Steve Valocchi (2002) and is currently working on a book on queer femininity and Hollywood films of the Cold War era, tentatively titled Subversive Femmes and Killer Fairies: Queer Femininity, National Identity, and Hollywood Film in the Cold War Era. 

Francis G. Couvares is E. Dwight Salmon professor of history and American studies at Amherst College. He has written a social history of industrial Pittsburgh, edited and contributed to Movie Censorship and American Culture (1996), and co-edited Interpretations of American History, 7^th ed (2000). He also served as on-screen contributor to Culture/Shock, a WGBH documentary on the history of art and censorship. 

John D’Emilio is director of the gender & women’s studies program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has written widely on the history of sexuality, social movements, and gay and lesbian life in the U.S. in the twentieth century. His books include The World Turned: Essays on Gay History, Politics and Culture (2002), Creating Change: Sexuality, Public Policy, and Civil Rights, co-edited with William Turner and Urvashi Vaid, (2000), Making Trouble: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and the University, (1992), Intimate Matters: a History of Sexuality in America, with Estelle Freedman, (1988) and Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 (1983). He is currently finishing a biography of Bayard Rustin, a former Communist, an absolute pacifist, a gay man and a militant Gandhian activist in post-World War II America. Professor D’Emilio looks at the ways race, political radicalism, and sexuality intersected in Rustin’s life and career, making him the target of governmental surveillance and constraining his role in movements for peace and racial justice in the United States.

John Davis is Alice Pratt Brown professor of art at Smith College, where he also chairs the art department and teaches in the American studies program. His books include The Landscape of Belief: Encountering the Holy Land in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture (1996) and (with Jaroslaw Leshko) Smith College Museum of Art: European and American Paintings and Sculpture, 1760-1960 (2000). His published work has concerned race, religion, and urban space, and he is presently working on a volume of primary sources in American visual culture. 

Andrea Friedman teaches in the department of history and the women and gender studies program at Washington University. Her book, Prurient Interests: Gender, Democracy, and Obscenity in New York City, 1909-1945 (2000) and articles such as “Sadists, Sissies, and the American Way of Life: Anti-Pornography Campaigns in Cold War America,” forthcoming in Gender and History focus on how sexual discourses structure practices of citizenship and politics in modern America. She is currently working on a book about the politics of homosexuality, sadomasochism, and miscegenation in the early Cold War tentatively titled The Power of Sex: Homosexuality, Violence and Race in Postwar American Politics. 

Jacquelyn Hall is professor of history at the University of North Carolina. Her research revolves mainly around women’s activism, workers’ culture, racial violence, and historical memory. She is currently working on a book about radical women writers and intellectuals, using the intertwined lives of three sisters – Grace Lumpkin, Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, and Elizabeth Lumpkin Glenn – as an allegory for broader issues. Her books include Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign Against Lynching (1983, 1993), and Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World co-authored with James Leloudis, Robert Korstad, Mary Murphy, LuAnn Jones, and Christopher B. Daly, (1987, 2000); she counts among her articles “Open Secrets: Memory, Imagination, and the Refashioning of Southern Identity,” in the American Quarterly (March 1998) and “Women Writers, the ‘Southern Front,’ and the Dialectical Imagination” in the Journal of Southern History (forthcoming, Feb., 2003). 

David M. Halperin says that teaching has always been the queerest profession, especially the male teaching of boys. One example can be found in the 1953 American Western, Shane, which illustrates and enacts the perennial anxieties that attach to the scene of instruction. In addition to being W. H. Auden professor of English at the University of Michigan and professor in the program in women’s studies at the University of Michigan, he is also honorary visiting professor in the School of Sociology, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. With Carolyn Dinshaw, he was founding editor of GLQ: a journal of lesbian and gay studies. He counts among his many prizes the Audre Lorde prize from the Committee on Lesbian and Gay History, American Historical Association, 2002; the Michael Lynch Service Award from the Gay and Lesbian Caucus of the Modern Language Association, 1993; and the Lambda Literary Award for The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, 1993. His books include How to Do the History of Homosexuality (2002), Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (1995) and One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (1990). He co-edited The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader with Henry Abelove and Michèle Barale (1993) and Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World with John J. Winkler and Froma I. Zeitlin (1990). His short memoir, “Out of Australia,” was recently published in The Penguin Book of Gay Australian Writing. 

Elizabeth Wanning Harries teaches English and comparative literature at Smith College and is currently chair of the English department. Her work continually circles back to questions of gender and genre and of representation, violence, and sexuality. Her books include The Unfinished Manner: Essays on the Fragment in the Later Eighteenth Century (1994) and Twice upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale (2001). 

Marjorie Hess received her B.A. from Smith College in 1962 and her M.L.S. from the State University of New York in 1973. She has been a librarian at Amherst College since 1981. A Northampton resident since 1982, she is active in the Democratic Party in the city, having served as Treasurer and 1st Vice Chair. In 2002 she was honored by being named the female Democrat of the Year. She has served as Chair of the Human Rights Commission since 1999 and last year was appointed by President Christ to the newly established Smith College Community Advisory Board. 

Jenny Holzer has been presenting her astringent ideas, arguments and sorrows in public spaces for more than twenty-five years.  Her work has been featured in international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale, the Dia Art Foundation and the Guggenheim Museums in New York City and Bilbao. More recently, she has been commissioned to create memorials for blacklisted writers during the McCarthy era, concentration camp victims and the war dead. In her practice, humor, kindness and moral courage are always rivaling ignorance and violence. 

Gerald Horne is professor of African/Afro-American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A former labor and civil rights attorney and former candidate for the U.S. Senate in California, he is the author of numerous books on radicalism, African and African-American studies and women’s studies. His books include, among others, Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930-1950: Moguls, Mobsters, Stars, Reds and Trade Unionists (2001), Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham DuBois (2000), Black Liberation Red Scare: Ben Davis and the Communist Party (1994), and Black and Red: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944-1963 (1986). 

Dan Horowitz has taught at Smith College since 1989, where he also directs the American studies program. His The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939‑1979 will appear from University of Massachusetts Press in 2003. Among his prior publications are The Morality of Spending: Attitudes Toward the Consumer Society In America, 1875-1940 (1985), Vance Packard & American Social Criticism (1994) and Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism (1998). 

Helen Horowitz graduated from Wellesley College and attended Harvard University where she received her Ph.D. in American Civilization. Her work in American history has explored cultural philanthropy, higher education, the American landscape, and sexuality. She has taught American studies and history and is currently the Sylvia Dlugasch Bauman professor in American studies at Smith College. She has recently received fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute and was the Mellon Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society. In addition to her most recent book Rereading Sex: Battles Over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America (2002), she is the author of the following books: Culture & the City: Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago from the 1880s to 1917 (1989), Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women’s Colleges from their Nineteenth-century Beginnings to the 1930s (1984, 1993), Campus Life: Undergraduate cultures from the End of the Eighteenth-Century to the Present (1987), and The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas (1994).

Alexandra Keller teaches in the film studies program at Smith College. She specializes in the American Western, cinema and the postmodern, avant‑garde and experimental film, and the relationship between cinema and other forms of artistic and cultural production. She has published work on avant‑garde film and video, experimental radiophony, theories of the body in early modern American popular culture, blockbuster cinema, and contemporary African American Westerns. Her forthcoming books include Re-Imagining the Frontier: American Westerns since the Reagan Administration and Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about James Cameron but Were Too Appalled to Ask. 

Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy is professor and head of women’s studies at the University of Arizona, Tucson. She received her Ph.D. in social anthropology from Cambridge University, England in 1972 based on her research with the Waunan of the Choco province, Columbia. Kennedy was a founding member of women’s studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo where she taught for twenty-eight years. Her research pioneered the study of lesbian history, a subject on which she has published widely, including the prize-winning book, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: the History of a Lesbian Community, written with Madeline Davis (1993). She has also written about the development of women’s studies as a field, and is co-author of Feminist Scholarship: Kindling in the Grove of Academe, with Ellen Dubois et al. (1985). Her recent scholarship, such as “‘But we would never talk about it’: The Structures of Lesbian Discretion in South Dakota, 1926-1933”, in Inventing Lesbian Cultures in America, ed. Ellen Lewin (1996), focuses on twentieth-century sexual and gender politics using oral histories. 

Robert Korstad’s work focuses on twentieth century U. S. history with a particular emphasis on the South, labor, African Americans, and social policy. He has published numerous articles and his books include Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth Century South (2003) and Dreaming of a Time: The School of Public Health, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1940-1990 (1990). He co-authored Like A Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World with Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, James Leloudis, Mary Murphy, LuAnn Jones, and Christopher B. Daly (1987, 1989, 2000); and edited Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Talk About Life in the Segregated South with William Chafe and Raymond Gavins, (2001). 

Shane Landrum graduated from Smith in 1998 with a double major in American studies and computer science. Shane is an independent scholar and works as a software engineer for Boston.com. Shane’s Smith undergraduate thesis was “More Firmly Based Today”: Anti-communism, Academic Freedom, and Smith College, 1947-56. Shane is particularly interested in the effects of anti-communism on Smith College in the early 1950s, with a focus on student activism and the administration’s response to professors testifying before government committees. 

Gary Lehring is assistant professor of government at Smith College and teaches in women’s studies. His research focuses on the way that public policies help shape and change our understanding of lesbian and gay identity. He has published a number of articles on lesbian and gay politics including pieces about gay liberation, and the political history of the gay movement, Queer Nation and gays in the military. His book, Officially Gay: The Political Construction of Gay Identity by the U.S. Military (forthcoming spring 2003), addresses this latter topic in greater detail. His current research project entitled Transborder Queers: Exporting Sexual Identity examines the ways gay identity and gay community as developed in the United States and Europe are being exported to the nations of Central America. 

Marc Lendler graduated from Antioch College in 1970 and is currently an assistant professor in the government department at Smith College. After working in factory jobs until 1981, he received his Ph.D in political science from Yale in 1987. He taught at Bennington College 1991-1995 and was among people fired who formed the Bennington Academic Freedom Committee. Professor Lendler has given lectures on academic freedom at Oberlin, Harvard, and AAUP national  and regional meetings.  His books are Just the Working Life, (1990) and Crisis and Political Beliefs, (1995). He has also published several articles on the issue of speech rights on college campuses, including “Civil Liberties and the Moderate Thought Police,” which is a study of Smith students and hate speech. 

Robert K. Martin is professor and chair of the département d’études anglaises at the Université de Montréal. His books include The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry (1979, 1998 in an expanded edition), Hero, Captain, and Stranger: Male Friendship, Social Critique, and Literary Form in the Sea Novels of Herman Melville (1986), and a number of edited volumes. He is currently working on a book to be titled The Death of the Sissy: Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Construction of Heterosexuality. Professor Martin has written dozens of articles on literature and sexuality including “Scandal at Smith” in Radical Teacher, no. 45, Winter 1994. He considers the 1960 raid on Newton Arvin’s apartment as a chilling example of the ways the state can manipulate sexuality. 

Mae Ngai is assistant professor of U.S. history at the University of Chicago. She is interested in questions of citizenship and alienage, nationalism, and race in U.S. history. She has explored these issues with research on restrictive immigration policy and the illegal alien as a new political and legal subject in the 1920s. Her recent articles include “The Strange Career of the Illegal Alien,” Law & History Review Spring 2003 and “The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law: A Reexamination of the Immigration Act of 1924,” Journal of American History 89 (1999). Her book Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America is forthcoming from Princeton University Press. She served as guest co-editor of the Amerasia Journal special issue on history and memory, December 2002.

Samuel Otter is an associate professor in the English department at the University of California at Berkeley. His recent book is Melville’s Anatomies (1999). His work focuses on late eighteenth and nineteenth-century U.S. literatures. He examines the relationships between discourse, form, and ideology: how texts make vivid the strange and compelling ways we have come to think about issues of character, body, and race. He links literature and history, establishes patterns of scene and figure, and argues that close reading also can be deep and wide reading. 

Peter Rowe, professor of government emeritus, arrived at Smith from Yale in 1958 and taught international law and politics, and American foreign policy until his retirement in 2000. His research interests included law and political change in India in the 1960’s and 1970’s and the law of the sea in the 1980’s and 1990’s. His experience of the political culture of the 1950’s began with a loyalty oath to the State of Maryland (as a university library assistant!), and ended at Smith witnessing the dismissal of the men whom we commemorate at this conference. He was Ned Spofford’s officemate in College Hall in 1959‑60. 

Ellen Schrecker is professor of history at Yeshiva University. She has been studying the anticommunist political repression of the 1940s and 1950s for many years and has written extensively on that subject. Her books include No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (1986), The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents (1993, rev. ed. 2002), and Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (1998), named “Outstanding Academic book” by Choice. 

Marilyn R. Schuster, professor of women’s studies, joined the Smith College faculty in 1971 as a member of the French department. Her most recent book, Passionate Communities: Reading Lesbian Resistance in Jane Rule’s Fiction (1999), examines the meanings and politics of sexuality, the relationship of language and sexuality, and the stakes of communities in individual claims on identity in the work of an American expatriate who left the U.S. during the McCarthy era. Marguerite Duras Revisited (1993) considers gender and sexuality in Duras’ fiction and films. In 1985 she co-edited Women’s Place in the Academy: Transforming the Liberal Arts Curriculum with Susan Van Dyne. She is currently editing the correspondence of Jane Rule and Toronto gay activist Rick Bébout, tentatively called “Our Time & Tribe”: The Letters of Jane Rule and Rick Bébout, 1981-1995.

Susan Van Dyne is professor and director of women’s studies at Smith College. During the 1980s, she led faculty workshops with Marilyn Schuster helping teachers integrate women’s studies, ethnic studies, and feminist teaching strategies into traditional courses. Together they edited Women’s Place in the Academy: Transforming the Liberal Arts (1985). She is also the author of Revising Life: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel Poems (1993). Her current project Proving Grounds: The Politics of Reading Contemporary Women Poets, uses feminist criticism, post-colonial studies, and ethnic studies to examine reading practices and commercial networks in the construction of literary traditions and poetic reputations. She has written articles about Adrienne Rich, Cathy Song, and the rivalry between Sylvia Plath and her husband, Ted Hughes. Along with other feminist faculty at Smith and Wesleyan, she is a founder of Meridians, a journal of feminism, race, and transnationalism, whose first issue was published in 2001. 

Kate Weigand teaches courses in U.S. history at Smith College and processes archival material at the Sophia Smith Collection. Her work has focused on the relationships among the Communist left, the women’s movement, and anti-communism in the post-WWII U.S. Her book, Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women’s Liberation (2001) traces the development of a small race- and class-conscious women’s liberation movement in and around the CPUSA in the 1930s and 1940s, its retreat during the late 1940s and 1950s, and its previously unrecognized influence on the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. 

Barry Werth is the author of three books, including The Scarlet Professor: Newton Arvin, A Literary Life Shattered by Scandal (2001) which examined the life and work of the literary critic Newton Arvin and the 1960 Smith homosexual scandal in which Arvin played a central role. The book won the American Library Association’s Stonewall prize for nonfiction and the Lambda Literary Award for biography and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award and the Publishing Triangle award. His other books are Damages (1998), which dissects a complex medical malpractice case and the medical-legal issues that surround it, and The Billion Dollar Molecule (1994), an exploration of the business of biomedical research. He is also co-author, with Alexander Tsiaras, of From Conception to Birth (2002). His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, GQ, Outside and other national publications. He has taught at the Boston University Graduate School of Journalism and Mount Holyoke College and will teach narrative nonfiction writing during the spring semester at Smith.

Tug Yourgrau is vice-president and co-founder of Powderhouse Productions.  One of his current projects, The Great Pink Scare, examines the terrible events at Smith College in 1960-61 and features extensive interviews with Joel Dorius, Ned Spofford and Daniel Aaron. Tug also serves as an Executive Producer for Extreme Engineering, a major prime-time ten part series that Powderhouse is producing for The Discovery Channel.  Recently, Tug produced, directed and wrote Secrets, Lies and Atomic Spies for PBS’ NOVA. He has served as executive producer on four documentary specials for The Discovery Channel, and he has produced and directed many hours of original programs for The Discovery Channel and PBS.  Tug is also an award-winning playwright and theatrical director. His play, The Song of Jacob Zulu, received 1993 TONY nominations for Best Play and Best Score (with Ladysmith Black Mambazo). Tug’s most recent play, Shooting in Madrid, opened at the Signature Theatre in Arlington, VA, in February 1998. Tug was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. His father served on the Smith College faculty in 1960-61 when the police invaded the apartments of Arvin, Spofford and Dorius.  To learn more about The Great Pink Scare, please go to Powderhouse’s website: www.powderhouse.net