The Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere (CHPS) in the UF College of Liberal Arts and Sciences offers sponsorships of workshops and speaker series with support from the David Yulee Endowment. The goals of the events are to present scholarship, foster the exchange of interpretations and ideas, and be accessible to an audience coming from a variety of disciplines as well as the wider public. CHPS solicits proposals from faculty, curators, and graduate students who wish to organize one-day events or longerrunning programs, especially ones that require collaboration between groups of faculty or students.
Dr. Jillian Hernandez, Associate Professor in the Center for Gender, Sexualities, and Women’s Studies Research, was the recipient of a CHPS Speaker Series in the Humanities Grant in 2020-2021.
With these funds, Dr. Hernandez organized the Radical Femininity: Women of Color Imaginaries, New Political Iconographies series. This series explored how contemporary artists, cultural producers, and activists are mobilizing feminine aesthetics to transform established political iconographies and create new lexicons. The series included the following events:
- April 6: “Roundtable Salon: Femme Figurations in Contemporary Art,” Featuring curator Christiana Ine-Kimba Boyle and artists Pamela Council, Yvette Mayorga, and Kenya (Robinson)
- April 9: Lecture by Dr. Omi’seke Natasha Tinsley, “Femme-inist is to Feminist as PYNK is to Pink”
- May 18: Lecture by Dr. madison moore, “Cooking in Heels: Queer Style in Isolation”
- May 25: “Women of Color Imaginaries, New Political Iconographies Mini-Symposium” featuring Jacquelyn Carmen Guerrero, Eddy Francisco Alvarez Jr., and Gloria Negrete-Lopez
Other co-sponsors joining the Center for Humanities included The Center for Gender, Sexualitities, and Women’s Studies Research, the School of Art and Art History, the Department of English and the Lux Art Institute.