Learn more about WGST's annual lectures
Our Adrenée Glover Freeman and Dr. Mary Baskin Waters lectures take a deeper dive into issues that affect our community.
Upcoming Events
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Spooky Spawn: Reproductive Body Horror and Perverse Parenthood explores how parent-child relationships, often idealized as nurturing and selfless, can become horrifying. In each film, a parental figure is thrust into unexpected circumstances they can’t fully control. As a result, they place their needs above their children’s, leading to disastrous outcomes that highlight moral corruption. Featuring bone-chillingly monstrous offspring, each story depicts the warped side of human procreation. Gone are rosy cheeks, soft skin, and infant laughter—these grotesque children are anything but endearing. Spooky Spawn lays bare the hidden dread that haunts life’s most joyous milestones, rendering horrors the mind can barely conceive. -
Spooky Spawn, curated by Julia Elliott and Nima Yolmo, is sponsored by the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at USC. All presentational and marketing materials were designed by South Carolina Honors students from Dr. Elliott’s Gender and Monstrosity in Horror Films class. -
Tickets are $5 for each film. Learn more and buy tickets on the Nickelodeon site.
- Professor Ramírez is a scholar of Latinx literature, history, visual culture, and performance. Her expertise includes immigration and assimilation, historical memory and erasure, Mexican American women’s history, zoot suits and style politics, and Latinxfuturism. She is the author of Assimilation: An Alternative History and The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory and a co-editor of Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship and Public Books. She has also written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post. Her current book project, Bioprecarity: Rethinking Migrant Life and Death, studies the figure of the child migrant and the value of time, youth, and vitality in racial capitalism and the postmigrant twenty-first century. A first-generation college graduate, she holds a PhD in Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley.
Annual Lectures
Past lecturers include:
2022 Aisha Durham [pdf]
2018 Ijeoma Oluo (view a clip)
2016 Anita F. Hill [pdf]
2013 Nikky Finney
2011 Anita F. Hill
2009 Tameika Isaac Devine
1995 Patricia Hill Collins
Previous Events
- September 17, 2025: Queering the German Archive: History, Art, and Activism in Weimar Berlin with Clayton Whisnant Event Flyer [pdf]
- October 4, 2025: How to Make Music in an Epidemic: Musical Responses to the AIDS Crisis with Dr. Matthew Jones Event Flyer [PDF]
- October 7, 2025: Adrenée Glover Freeman Lecture with Shannon C. Eaves Event Flyer [pdf]
- January 31, 2025: The Potential of Operatic Spaces Today with Naomi André Event Flyer [pdf]
- February 6, 2025: Gamecock Connect First Generation Networking Dinner Event Flyer [pdf]
- March 2, 2025: First Sunday Supper at the Harriet Hancock Center Event Flyer [pdf]
- March 25, 2025: 8th Annual Dr. Mary Baskin Waters Lecture with Dr. Elizabeth Dale Event Flyer [pdf]
- April 4, 2025: Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood with Gretchen Sisson Event Flyer [pdf]
- October 8, 2024: Adrenée Glover Freeman Lecture with Dr. Shaneen Dials-Corujo Event Flyer [pdf]
- March 13-23, 2024: "How Can Arts Foster Community Healing, Solidarity, and Social Change?"- A Women's Well Being Initiative Exhibition Event Flyer [pdf]
- March 14, 2024: Gay Sign Language Crash Course & Comedy Night with Hayden Kristal Event Flyer [pdf]
- March 20, 2024: "Stating the Obvious: Lessons from Epic Failures" with Dr. Monica McLemore Event Flyer [pdf]
- April 7, 2024: “Practicing Health Equity: The History of Early African American Women Physicians”- 7th Annual Dr. Mary Baskin Waters Lecture with Dr. Vanessa Gamble Event Flyer [pdf]
- April 11, 2024: Poetry Slam at Finnley Center Event Flyer [pdf]
- April 12, 2024: WGST Award Ceremony Event Flyer [pdf]
- May 19-23, 2024: South Carolina Women's and Gender Studies Undergraduate Summer Institute Event Flyer [pdf]
- September 8-9, 2023: WGST at 50: From the Past Into the Future Event Flyer [pd-f]
- September 27, 2023: Transwomanhood's History with Dr. Jules Gill-Peterson Event flyer [pdf]
- October 9, 2023: Adrenée Glover Freeman lecture with Dr. Daphne A. Brooks Event flyer [pdf]
- November 8, 2023: Cancer Alley and Eco-activism with Dr. Rosalind Hinton Event flyer [pdf]
- January 18,2023: Post-Roe in the US: Lessons Learned Globally to Inform Local Action with Dr. Deborah Billings Event Flyer [pdf]
- January 18-22, 2023: Girls Speak - Women's Well-Being Initiative Exhibition Event Flyer [pdf]
- January 30, 2023 “Getting Zucked:” Examining Digital Violence and Injustice Online and IRL with Dr. Kishonna Gray. Part of the Violence (In)Justice Press Play Lecture Series.
- February 6, 2023 Teaching Social Justice Seminar Event flyer
- March 23rd: Troubling the Public During Troubling Times with Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom Event Flyer [pdf]
- March 24th: Stigma, Sensitivity, and Surveys: Measuring Abortion Post-Dobbs with Dr. Laura Lindberg Event Flyer [pdf]
- Violence (In)Justice Lecture Series
- August 25-September 29, 2022: Socially Engaged Ceramics (learn more on the SVAD website)
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October 6, 2022: Travelling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance with Mia Bay Event Flyer [pdf] -
October 6-27, 2022: Feminist Horror Film Series: Family Trouble: Parenthood, Gender, and the Monstrous-Feminine (learn more on the Honors College website) -
October 12-26, 2022: Fall Literary Festival (learn more on the University Library website) -
October 17, 2022: Adrenée Glover Freeman lecture with Dr. Aisha Durham Event Flyer [pdf]
- February 10-13, 2022: The 2022 Comparative Literature Conference: Truth in the Late Foucault (learn more on the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures website)
- February 11, 2022 at 2PM: Writing workshop with Briallen Hopper Event Flyer [pdf]
- February 12, 2022 at 4:30PM: Odd Birds Books reading with Briallen Hopper – Easy to Love: An alternative Valentine’s Day event celebrating friendship, queerness, spinsterhood, and family Event Flyer [pdf]
- March 2, 2022 at 4:30PM: Programs of Life with Dr. Patrick R. Grzanka Event Flyer [pdf]
- March 31, 2022 at 6PM: Dr. Mary Baskin Waters Lecture with Dr. Ruha Benjamin Event flyer [pdf]
- April 4, 2022 at 4:30PM: Kashmir: The Personal is Political Event flyer [pdf]
- Climates Theme Semester Violence (In)justice Lecture Series: Transgressed: Intimate Partner Violence in Transgender Lives Event Information
- University Libraries' Fall Literary Festival event with Jacqueline Woodson, children's author Event Information
- Climates Theme Semester Violence (In)justice Lecture Series: Intersectionality and Youth Violence Event Information
- Climates Theme Semester Violence (In)justice Lecture Series: Racialized State Violence and the Paradox of Mothers’ (In)visibility Event Information
- Religion, Sexuality and Freedom: a Talk with Dr. Emily Kazyak and Dr. Kelsy Burke Event Flyer [pdf]
- A Talk with Irish Poet Annemarie Ní Churreáin Event Flyer [pdf]
- TC Tolbert, editor of Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry Event Flyer [pdf]
- Claudia Smith Brinson discusses Stories of Struggle: The Clash over Civil Rights in South Carolina Event Flyer [pdf]
- Matias Viegener joins Dr. Ed Madden's "Queer Times, Queer Lives" Event Flyer [pdf]
- Joseph Valente and Margot Gayle Backus discuss their work The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature Event Flyer [pdf]
- WGST 298 welcomes Cooper Lee Bombardier to discuss Pass with Care Event Flyer [pdf]
- 27th Annual Adrenée Glover Freeman Lecture with Sandra Rattley #UNLADYLIKE 2020
- CAS Justice Theme Semester guest speaker Lewis Raven Wallace
- The Challenges and Rewards of Social Justice Guided Teaching and Research and Activism with Dr. Lynn Weber
- Rethinking Recognition: Overcoming Displacement and Reification in Cultural Politics with Georgia Warnke
- Southern Truth Award Lecture with Dorothy Allison, part of the Deckle Edge Literary
Festival
- 26th Annual Adrenée Glover Freeman Lecture with Valerie Smith
- Meet my Major event
- 25th Annual Adrenée Glover Freeman Lecture with Ijeoma Oluo UofSC article Free Times article
- Medusa's Gaze: The Monstrous Feminine Daily Gamecock article on series
- Yours in Sisterhood Screening and Filmmaker Talkback
- Women as Agents of Change in Rule of Law with Dr. Mamphela Ramphele Event Spotlight
- Alumni Panel: What Can You Do with a Degree in Women's & Gender Studies? Event flyer [pdf]
- Preserving Personal Archives: Remembering South Carolina Women's History Sophia Institute article