Signature Events
The Gender Institute hosts cutting edge scholars on gender and sexuality from across the U.S. and the globe. Often organized as thematic series, these lectures provide a rich opportunity for learning and discussion.
Fall 2025 Events
Gender Institute Tour of the UB Archives
with Hope Dunbar, University Archivist, Â鶹´«Ã½o Libraries
Tuesday, September 23, 2025
1:00 - 2:00pm (ET)
University Archives, 420 Capen Hall
Space is limited! RSVP is required.
Join a small group trip to the University Archives to see what UB houses in LGBTQ and women's collections!
Sex, Savin, and Scandal: Rethinking the History of Abortion in Early America
with Mary E. Fissell, J. Mario Molina Professor of the History of Medicine in the Department of the History of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University
Tuesday, October 21, 2025
3:30 - 5:00pm (ET)
509 O'Brian Hall & via Zoom
In this talk Fissell will explore the history of abortion in colonial America and its English antecedents, using a range of sources including court cases, recipe books, and almanacs, demonstrating that abortion was widely known and often unproblematic.
Mary E. Fissell is the Inaugural J. Mario Molina Professor of the History of Medicine in the Department of the History of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University, where she also holds appointments in the Departments of History and History of Science and Technology. She currently serves as president of the AAHM, having edited the Bulletin of the History of Medicine for 15 years. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the NLM, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Davis Center at Princeton University.
Her scholarly work has focused on the patient's perspective in the history of medicine; gender, sexuality, and the history of the body; popular culture; and books and reading in early modern England and the Atlantic world. Her book Vernacular Bodies (Oxford, 2004) analyzed how everyday ideas about making babies mediated large scale social, political, and religious change. She’s recently published Pushback (Seal Books, 2025), a history of abortion from antiquity to antibiotics. She has published and podcasted on topics including pregnancy determination, popular books about sex, and the history of early-modern vermin.
Spring 2025 Events
This event is a collaborative effort between the UB Critical Ecologies Research Collaborative, the Baldy Center, and the UB Gender Institute, and is co-sponsored by the Office of International Education and the Department of Geography.
Climate Change and Gender in the Global South
Wednesday, February 26, 2025
3:00 - 4:30pm (ET)
509 O'Brian Hall
Sarah Besky is Professor of the Anthropology of Work at the New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University. Her research uses ethnographic and historical methods to explore questions of labor, environment, and capitalism in the Himalayas and India. She is the author of The Darjeeling Distinction: Labor and Justice on Fair-Trade Tea Plantations in India (University of California Press, 2014) and Tasting Qualities: The Past and Future of Tea (University of California Press, 2020). She also co-edited How Nature Works: Rethinking Labor on a Troubled Planet (SAR Press, 2019) with Alex Blanchette. Sarah’s currently working on a new book on the long history of agrarian crisis in Kalimpong, West Bengal.
Andrea Marston is Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Her research examines the political economics and cultural politics of natural resources and energy systems, with a focus on raced and gendered injustices in Latin America. She is author of Subterranean Matters: Cooperative Mining and Resource Nationalism in Plurinational Bolivia (Duke University Press, 2024), which explores the embodied politics of small-scale tin mining on the Bolivian altiplano. She has also published articles in journals such as Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Environmental Humanities, Journal of Peasant Studies, and Environment and Planning A, among others. Her work has been supported by a Margaret FitzSimmons Early Career Award in Political Ecology, an ACLS Faculty Fellowship, an ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship, a Pierre Elliott Trudeau Scholarship, and a SSHRC Doctoral Scholarship. She is currently co-editor for the book series Critical Geographies of Latin America and the Caribbean (University of Florida Press).
Li Zhang is an assistant professor of sociology and environmental studies at Amherst College. She is the author of The Origins of COVID-19: China and Global Capitalism (Stanford University Press, 2021) and Co-PI of a USDA-funded national-level study on the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on US food supply chains. She uses ethnographic methods, surveys, and digital archives to examine food safety, security, sovereignty, gender, race/ethnicity, indigeneity, health and environmental justice, and climate change resilience and adaptation.
The Beyond Binaries Signature Lecture Series is co-sponsored by Office of Inclusive Excellence and the Department of Biological Sciences.
Queering Global Flora: Plant Worlds and the Afterlives of Empire
with Banu Subramaniam, Luella LaMer Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College
Thursday, April 17, 2025
509 O'Brian & via Zoom
3:30 - 5:00pm (ET)
Free and open to the public.
How have histories of colonialism and their foundational language of gender, race, sexuality, and nation shaped the language, terminology, and theories of the modern plant sciences? How and why do botanical theories remain grounded in the violence of their colonial pasts? In wrestling with these difficult origins, I develop the concept of migrant ecologies to retheorize plant migration and reproductive biology. I explore new biological frameworks that harness the power of feminist thought in order to reimagine and reinvigorate our love of plants.
Banu Subramaniam is the Luella LaMer Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College. Trained as a plant evolutionary biologist, Banu engages the feminist studies of science in the practices of experimental biology and is author of Botany of Empire (2024), Holy Science (2019) and Ghost Stories for Darwin (2016).