Women's and Gender Studies has a long tradition of sponsoring a wide range of intellectually engaging events. These have included talks by prominent scholars and activists, workshops, and roundtables as well as presentations by undergraduates and graduate students in our program. Read on to learn more about the great programming we have hosted over the years.
 | 2023 Zakiya LunaLuna is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Dean’s Distinguished Professorial Scholar at Washington University in Saint Louis. Her research, teaching, and community work focus on social movements, reproduction, human rights and intersectionality. Her research on the reproductive justice movement includes the book Reproductive Rights as Human Rights: Women of Color and the Fight for Reproductive Justice (NYU Press, 2020), which was included on the Oprah Daily list “The 12 Books You Need to Read Post the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade Smackdown.” |
 | 2022 Kamilah Willingham"Healing from Sexual Trauma: A Dialogue with Kamilah Willingham" |
 | 2021 Katharine Donato"Gender and International Migration: From Slavery to Present" In collaboration with the School of Global Integrative Studies, Women’s & Gender Studies hosted Professor Katharine Donato of Georgetown University. As a leading scholar in the interdisciplinary study of women and im/migration, Donato complements well recent events on UNL’s campus, including the Hostile Terrain Project and the Human Trafficking Conference whose theme was labor migration. |
 | 2020 Jeannette Jones and Zakiya Luna"Say Their Names: Centering Black Women in the Struggle for Justice" Drs. Jeannette Jones (UNL) and Zakiya Luna (University of CA - Santa Barbara) examined the often-overlooked activism and leadership of women of color in the United States. This dialogue and discussion allowed us to hear from two outstanding scholars and then to ask questions and discuss together. |
 | 2019 Tomi-Ann Roberts"Objects in Mirror are Closer than They Appear" In October 2017, Tomi-Ann Roberts was launched into the public limelight when she came out in the New York Times as a victim of sexual harassment by Harvey Weinstein when she was a college student. She has since been featured in countless news stories describing the connection between that experience, and many others, and her scholarly work. In 1997 she and her co-author proposed a theoretical perspective to guide research and advocacy in the psychology of sexual objectification, arguing that it is a form of sexism wherein women and girls are treated as collections of body parts, valued predominantly for their consumption by others, and the pernicious ways this treatment gets internalized as self-objectification. |