News & Events

Mab Segrest on "Administrations of Lunacy: Race, Psychiatry, and Georgia's State Hospital"

Wednesday, March 28, 2018, 6:00pm to 8:00pm
Center for Documentary Studies, 1317 W. Pettigrew St., Durham, NC 27705 [map]

How does a culture that allows lynching decide who is sane? Renowned writer/activist/scholar Mab Segrest shares how the answers to such questions emerged from her study of the archives of Georgia's state mental hospital at Milledgeville, founded in 1842. Segrest will read from her upcoming book about how the history of Georgia's hospital reveals the intimate relationships between psychiatry and white settler colonialism in the United States--a story that we see first through the eyes of its patients.

Mab Segrest is the Fuller-Maathai Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at Connecticut College and author of Memoir of a Race Traitor, an account of her work against Klan and neo-Nazi movements in North Carolina in the 1980s. She is a 2017-18 fellow at the National Humanities Center. Segrest's papers are held at the Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture.

Honoring Jean O'Barr's 75th Birthday

“The best knowledge is created in a social context.” — Jean Fox O'Barr

Political scientist and women’s studies scholar Jean Fox O’Barr has been a community builder at Duke University since 1969, continuing her connection even after retiring in 2008. After directing Continuing Education for 11 years, she established the Women’s Studies Program in 1983. O’Barr did groundbreaking work to foster connections between faculty members and with students while fulfilling her roles as an administrator, as the editor of feminist journal Signs and as a published author.

As a co-founder of the Bingham Center, O’Barr was a member of a small group that created the Women's Studies Archivist position in 1988. The center was permanently endowed in 1993 and named the "Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture" in 1999. In 2009, the Bingham Center held a symposium in honor of O’Barr’s influential career at Duke University and her dedication to women’s education. Join the Bingham Center in celebrating Dr. O'Barr's 75th birthday this year by making a contribution in her honor. Your gift will support the work of our librarians to collect and provide access to books, digital media, manuscripts and photographs documenting five centuries of women’s history.

Make a donation in honor of Dr. Jean Fox O'Barr's 75th birthday