While the gender wage gap narrowed over the course of the 20th century, progress has largely stalled since the 1990s. One reason may be women’s underrepresentation in well-remunerated, in-demand occupations such as computer science--a field where women’s representation has actually decreased over time. One possible explanation for that trend? The wage gap. Sharon Sassler, Professor of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University, will examine three key factors in this persistent gap: gender, race/ethnicity, and nativity.

As colonial Korea transitioned to capitalism, intellectuals embraced the idea of gender equality as well as equality among economic classes and ethnicities (Koreans, Japanese and Westerners). On the one hand, colonial intellectuals promoted women’s education and kinship system reforms. On the other, canonical works of Korean literature from the early 20th century remasculinized colonized men through portrayals of violence against women. How did colonial literature reconcile the modern imperative of equality with the new inequalities that capitalism produced?

Richard Meyer, Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor in Art History at Stanford University, will discuss the obscure-yet-fascinating career of the self-taught artist Morris Hirshfield (1872-1946), a former tailor and slipper manufacturer who took up painting at the age of 65. Hirshfield's wildly stylized pictures of animals, landscapes, and female nudes attracted a great degree of attention, both positive and negative, in the 1940s. Embraced by Picasso, Mondrian, and Duchamp,  Hirshfield was given a one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943.

Michael Haneke’s Amour (2012) is set in a single restricted location, the Parisian apartment in which a dying, suffering woman is being cared for by her husband. The film plots an obsessive formal language of spatial increments, organizing itself around minor but crucial distances across the geography of the home. Against and within this ordered relation of objects and space, extraordinary pain and terrible violence ultimately arrive.

Feminist anthropologist Dána-Ain Davis, professor of urban studies at Queens College, will give a talk about her new book, Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth (NYU Press) followed by an author-meets-critics session.

Join Josephine Lee and Sarah Bellamy for a conversation about the intersecting histories and contemporary dynamics of black and Asian representation in American theater. Lee will share current research on how different theatrical forms such as minstrelsy, vaudeville, and musical theater juxtaposed blackface representation and stage orientalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Bellamy will comment on how this history has affected theater practice today, and what kinds of change and collaboration we might imagine for the future.

Based on extensive interviews and field research in the homes and kitchens of a diverse group of American families, the new book Pressure Cooker by Sarah Bowen, Joslyn Brenton and Sinikka Elliot challenges the logic of the most popular foodie mantras of our time, showing how they miss the mark and up the ante for parents and children. Romantic images of family meals are inviting, but they create a fiction that does little to fix the problems in the food system.

Chennai is currently in the news due to a catastrophic water shortage. Because of ongoing drought, its reservoirs are dry and millions lack reliable access to water. Even hospitals lack sufficient water to operate.