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WOMEN AT THE CENTER: SUMMER 2026
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| Healing and Truth-Telling: the Aishah Shahidah Simmons papers
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 | Portrait of Aishah Shahidah Simmons by Studio TSHAY
“Placing my papers at Duke marks an important moment in my life and work. As a Black feminist lesbian survivor-healer whose cultural works, writings, and images are survivor-centered and rooted in non-carceral accountability, reaching communities globally, I am grateful that this work will be held with intention across the Bingham Center, the Franklin Research Center, and the Archive of Documentary Arts, accessible to generations who can learn from this work as ground to stand on and build beyond what I could imagine.” – Aishah Shahidah Simmons
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| We are pleased to announce that the Aishah Shahidah Simmons papers are now open for research. Simmons is a Black feminist lesbian Buddhist practitioner, dharma teacher, and award-winning writer-filmmaker. Through three decades of cultural work, Simmons has created films which address Black lesbian identity, and sexual violence in Black communities, including her feature-length, award-winning NO! The Rape Documentary (2006).
Simmons’s Lambda Literary Award-winning anthology, love WITH accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse, brings together diasporic Black child sexual abuse survivors and advocates who, through first-person transformative storytelling, explore child sexual abuse within Black families and communities.
The daughter of Civil Rights activists and scholars Michael Simmons and Dr. Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons, and the sister of Grammy Award-winning DJ and record executive Tyree Cinque Simmons (DJ Drama), Simmons grew up in Philadelphia. She is married to Black lesbian trailblazer Sheila Alexander-Reid, founder of Women in the Life. Simmons founded the multi-media company AfroLez® Productions in 1992 while participating in a scriptwriting workshop at Scribe Video Center taught by her mentor, the late award-winning author and filmmaker Toni Cade Bambara.
The Aishah Shahidah Simmons papers were acquired as part of the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture, the John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture, and the Archive of Documentary Arts. The collection is comprised of 39 linear feet of materials that document Simmons’s professional career, filmmaking endeavors, and personal life. Researchers will be able to explore Simmons’s writings, correspondence, working files, and an extensive collection of audiovisual materials documenting her life and work. The materials will provide insight into independent filmmaking in the 1990s and 2000s through an intersectional Black feminist lesbian lens and preserve the personal stories of many Black women survivors of sexual violence who courageously chose to speak their truth.
Technical Services Archivist Ren Bickel prepared the collection for research use. Reflecting on Simmons’ papers, she notes, “This collection documents Simmons’s deep commitment to a Black feminist approach to survivor-centered cultural work, especially in her years-long quest to make NO! The Rape Documentary. Researchers will find an array of information about the practical aspects of creating independent documentary films, from securing funding and managing logistics, to writing, filming, and editing. The stories Simmons gathered of Black women survivors’ experiences are powerful and affecting. I’m so excited to see what researchers will discover and how they’ll incorporate the materials into their own writings and projects.”
Read the full announcement on the Devil's Tale blog. Contributed by Ren Bickel, Technical Services Archivist.
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| Announcing 2026-2027 Research Travel Grant Recipients
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Octavia Butler signs copies of her book Blood Child and Other Stories for eager readers at a table in Charis Books and More, Atlanta, GA, c. 1995.
Hope Tucker's documentary project will explore Charis Books and other feminist bookstores in the South.
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Mary Lily Travel Grants
Amaluana Brock, Graduate Student, Auburn University, “1990s Young Women Zines as Feminist Identity Building”
Hsiao-Yun Chu, Faculty, San Francisco State University, “Exquisite Boredom: Ladies Fancy Workbooks and the Birth of Leisure Crafts, 1850 – 1910"
Maddy Coy, Faculty, University of Florida, “Feminist Knowledge, Violence Against Women, and Public Policy”
Hannah Dudley-Shotwell, Faculty, Longwood University, and Justina Licata, Faculty, Indiana University East, “A History of Abortion Funds in the U.S., 1960s–Present”
Halina Haruma, Graduate Student, Northeastern University, “An Intellectual History of African American Women’s Disability Politics, 1900s–1920″ (Jointly awarded with the Franklin Center)
Ijeoma Kola, Faculty, University of Notre Dame, “Kitchen Chemists: Black Women, Medical Neglect, and the Science of the Natural Hair Movement” (Jointly awarded with the Hartman Center)
Felicity Palma, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Brown University, “Eurydice in the Underworld”
Hope Tucker, Faculty, University of Iowa, “Feminist Bookstores in the South: A Film” (See image above.)
Lisa Walters, Faculty, University of Queensland, “Forgotten Histories: Renaissance Women and the Science of Atomism”
Jessie Wilkerson, Faculty, University of Tennessee Knoxville, “In Sisterhood, In Struggle: A History of Feminist Possibilities in the American South”
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Research Travel Grants
Rachel Haines, Graduate Student, University of Virginia, “Close Reading as Queer Reading: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s ‘kind of formalism’”
Jennifer Hamilton, Faculty, University of New England, Australia, “Exploring the Relationship Between Queer Theory, Buddhism, and Textile Art in Sedgwick’s Body of Work”
Samuel Rutherford, Faculty, University of Glasgow, “Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, Transmasculinity and the History of Queer Ideas”
Suzanne Scanlon, Faculty, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, “In Time, a novel”
Harry H. Harkins, Jr. T'73 Travel Grants for LGBTQ History
Cassandra Gillig, Graduate Student, Northwestern University, “Learning Lesbian Sex”
Connall MacLennan, Graduate Student, University College London, “The Church and the Formation of Queer Identity, Community, and Politics in the State of Georgia, 1945-2015”
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gender liberators, by Sky Syzygy. 2024. Image courtesy of Women's Studio Workshop.
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gender liberators, by Sky Syzygy (Women's Studio Workshop, 2024)
gender liberators is an anthology of writing and art by trans*, Two-spirit, nonbinary, and trans-adjacent authors and creators from 20th-century Turtle Island/North America. The materials were selected based on hundreds of interviews that Sky Syzygy has conducted with elders, archivists, scholars, and cultural workers about their lives and work. Syzygy conducted archival research for this work, including at the Rubenstein Library. This anthology centers the perspectives and visual and print culture of trans and queer life and resists some of the biases of existing histories and archives that under-represent the geographic South and Midwest, trans* communities of color, and trans masculine communities. Full description and more images can be found on the Women's Studio Workshop website.
What Does It Mean To Mend? by Stella Nall (Women's Studio Workshop, 2025)
Informed by the history of her ancestors and her own experiences navigating the world as a queer mixed-race Apsáalooke (Crow) woman, Nall’s illustrated poems trace a journey of processing personal, cultural, and creative experiences, working towards a sense of self-understood wholeness. Her work also engages intergenerational trauma inflicted by assimilative boarding schools, their impact on her people, family, and life. The book’s handmade paper cover is letterpress printed and beaded using baaluxapíihkuua, one of the first beadwork styles that Nall learned as a child. The handmade paper used for the edition’s covers is itself a form of visible mending. It was created from an earlier misprint of the book—shredded, wetted, and reformed anew—its original flaws still present, though now unrecognizable. Full description and more images can be found on the Women's Studio Workshop website.
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Women at Work: A dramatic reading called "Women's Work is Never Done" and "Bread & Roses," a socialist newsletter from Chapel Hill, NC, 1973, use the same illustration of women in solidarity with fists raised.
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We continued to be busy with classroom visits from new and repeat courses in the spring semester.
- Archival Appraisal (UNC-Chapel Hill)
- Baldwin Scholars Seminar for Women's Leadership
- Comics and Zines (Arts and Visual Studies)
- Feminist Activism (Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies)
- Feminist Rhetorics (Writing)
- Gaming in the Disciplines (English, UNC-Chapel Hill)
- Gender and Popular Culture (GSF)
- Media, Meaning, and Messages (GSF)
- Post 45 Graduate Student Symposium (workshop on the Eve Kosofsky Segwick papers)
- Project Vox (Early Modern Women Philosophers)
- Queer Theories of Experience and Art (Art History)
- Race, Gender, and Sexuality (GSF)
- Radical Magic: Writing and the Occult (Writing 120)
- Representing Breast Cancer: Feminist Literature, Art, and Film (GSF)
- Women at Work (GSF)
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Minnie Bruce Pratt
Photo: Leslie Feinberg, 2012
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Celebration of Minnie Bruce Pratt
Tuesday, November 10 at 5:30 p.m.
Smith Warehouse, Ahmadieh Family Lecture Hall, Bay 4; 114 S Buchanan Blvd, Durham, NC
Please join us for a celebration the work and legacies of Minnie Bruce Pratt featuring readers and admirers of Pratt’s work including Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Alexa Garvoille, Laura Harris, Silas Heying, Julie Enszer, Kelly Wooten, and more. The fall issue of the Georgia Review contains a folio of material that pays tribute to the exemplary poet and poet citizen Minnie Bruce Pratt. Sinister Wisdom’s editor, Julie R Enszer, worked on this folio with Taylor Marie Doherty, Laura Harris, Silas Heying, and Amanda Mixon. This event will be moderated by Gerald Maa, director & editor of the Georgia Review. Sponsored by the Sallie Bingham Center, the Georgia Review, and Sinister Wisdom.
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Anonymous portrait of a young woman, c 1900
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A collection of thirty large, unframed photographic portraits, collected by artist Delouis Wilson, were recently digitized by Rubenstein Library staff. Wilson found these striking studio portraits of African American individuals, couples, and families, circa 1890s-1940s, in thrift stores and flea markets chiefly in the South.
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