Women Academics From The United States

"The history of the cult of in Rome has been well investigated and is well known ... In 204 B.C. a meteorite was brought from in to Rome. It came on a ship named Salvia up the Tiber. When the ship got stuck in the shallow waters, , an aristocratic maiden, freed it and drew it upstream with her belt. This miracle is reported by Ovid (Fasti, 4, 291-348) in the time of Augustus. It is still represented on an altar in the Capitoline Museum dedicated by Claudia Syntyche, probably in the Antonine period ... The same event is represented on a medallion for , that is after death and deification in 141 A.D. by her husband the emperor ... The statue, or rather the sacred stone, representing Cybele was then brought up to the , where under lively participation by the aristocracy was dedicated to the and a temple was erected and dedicated in 191 B.C. Augustus restored this temple as he did many other temples in Rome."

"(What have you seen change positively and negatively since that time especially in Af Am [African American] children’s literature?) RWG: The biggest change is being able to find African American lit for children and young people in libraries and bookstores. We’re here. We’re out on the shelves with our diverse stories. Characters don’t bear the weight of having to represent all African-Americans, or of meeting publishers’ black quota for the year. We have a presence, yet there’s still a need for even more stories and more writers to explore different genres. If you would have asked me twenty years ago about negativity in African American literature for young people, my lips would still be flapping. I would have begun with them not letting us tell our stories as we know them, and how they let people outside the race and culture write whatever they wanted and call it an African American story. That was one of my main gripes. “Why can’t I tell a story I know to be true, but ‘she’ can write this fake mess?” Ahem. I’ve calmed down over the years. My view has broadened as writing from the other side has gotten better. Truer. More and more I see that we are not a people unto our selves. We make up a good deal of the American experience, culture and expression. I feel both loss and gain. This is the way of forward movement. (2008)"

"(Do you consider yourself a pioneer?) RWG: Our pioneers are Kristen Hunter, Alice Childress, Rosa Guy, Joyce Hansen, Mildred Taylor, Joyce Carol Thomas, Brenda Wilkinson, Virginia Hamilton, [[Julius Lester, and Walter Dean Myers. Manchild in the Promised Land is our Catcher in the Rye. These are our pioneers, while those still with us remain quite a force in young adult literature after thirty and forty years of publishing. (2008)"

"I am to archaeologists what the is to tourists. They keep coming to see if the old lady is still around. And working."

"Ultimately, it’s the reader’s book. It’s about what they receive and how they interpret it. (2008)"

"My intention is that the more humanity we see, the better we can judge, acknowledge, understand and even indict. There is the horror, and there is also the hope. I wouldn’t be here if not for the people who endured but also loved. I want to pass that on to the reader. (2021)"

"(In a note included with advance editions of the book, referring to slavery and its legacies, you wrote, “At no other time in our nation’s history have readers sought out more this examination and conversation.” Why do you think now is a particularly important moment for this reflection?) RWG: I’ve revised this answer 10 times. I have been watching the trial of the police officer charged with the murder of George Floyd. I have become that boy who asked, “Why do they hate us?” And then I have my answer and I get angry. I’m a person in my 60s who sees the present as a cycle. We fight for rights because we experience inequities and brutalities, we get rights, we move forward, and then we repeat the cycle. What is happening—the murder of and violence against people of color, the suppression of rights, the unequal access to health care—is not new. It’s part of the cycle. We need to talk openly about what is happening to people because of their race, ethnicity and gender, because the cycle continues. We see it happening before our eyes daily. Each and every one of us has to become the conscience of this country by what we say and do. People are being killed or brutalized on the basis of simply existing. We are not too far from our enslaved ancestors. We have to speak up and act up when the unconscionable is normalized. But we have to talk before there can be any reparations. We have to be unafraid to have uncomfortable conversations with an emphasis on listening. (2021)"

"[asked what readers can expect from her book] Surprises and to challenge our own ideas of humanity. Novels are the home for irony, paradox, contradiction—all the things that make humans interesting to read and write about. (2021)"

"writing is an art but it’s work. If you don’t value your work, who will? (2021)"

"It was a strange, wonderful feeling. To discover eyes upon you when you expected no one to notice you at all. (p214)"

""If you knew what I knew, seen what I've seen, you wouldn't be so quick to pull the plow." (p110)"

"Children were a big part of the Black Panther Movement. At that time there were no books about the roles children played in the movement so I thought I should write a story that focused on children. I was also in awe of the women in the movement, like Angela Davis, Elaine Brown, Kathleen Cleaver and many more. They were strong and intelligent women who fought racism and sexism mainly through their words. (FAQ)"

"(How do you tackle writer’s block?) I box, knit, write, and read. Physicality helps to jar me out of my mental state. It shakes things free. (2017)"

"(What advice do you have for aspiring writers?) Write a little bit every day. I began by writing 500 words a day, but I think 25-100 words a day, every day will help a beginning writer gain confidence and a flow of thoughts and writing. Read widely! Be adventurous with your reading. Nothing helps writing like having the sound of good writing in your mind’s ear. Try new things. New foods. Visit new places. Then write about your experiences. (FAQ)"

""Enough people in the world trying to silence us. Girl, you better speak up.” (p238)"

"We owe our knowledge of pre-Greek art in Crete in large measure to the excavations of . The six volumes of Evans' publication of The Palace of Minos at Knossos, which appeared between 1921 and 1936, aroused a storm of enthusiasm for this marvelous civilization until then unknown. Cretan art is not only fundamentally different from but aesthetically superior to Egyptian and Oriental art. was from the beginning a close observer of this newly-discovered civilization and an important contributor to the vast literature which sprang up as a consequence of the many problems surrounding . I remember his guided tours for Fellows of the , whose director he became. They introduced us to this new civilization in the same clear and competent manner that I now find in his last book, written when he was 88 years old. … It is the best first introduction to Cretan art I know."

"I enjoyed the sound of our voices following one another. Sounded like a favorite song from the radio they no longer play, so when you hear it, you remember how things were. (p144)"

"That was how I knew Sister Mukumbo was a real teacher, aside from her welcoming smile and her blackboard penmanship. She asked a teacher's type of question. The kind that says: Join in. (p71)"

"I’ve addressed topics like teen pregnancy, abortion, school violence, rape, and abuse. But I think in each and every book, with the exception of No Laughter Here, the real story is the characters’ struggle with themselves. It’s always self-struggle, and no matter how intense the other subject matter, I don’t like to take that away from the character. I believe with every story there’s something within the main character that must be realized, and I like to give them the power to do that. (2015)"

"In the end, I learned two things about the long-term effects of . One is that a child's death is disorienting. The human mind is wired to find patterns and attach meanings, to associate things that are alike, to generalize from one example to another, in short, to make sense of things. Your mind could no more consciously stop doing this than your heart could consciously stop beating. But children's deaths make no sense, have no precedents, are part of no pattern; their deaths are unnatural and wrong. So parents fight their wiring, change their perspectives, and adjust to a reality that makes little sense. The other thing I learned is that letting go of a child is impossible. ..."

"Following the launch of NASA's planet-finding in 2009, the number of possible s quickly multiplied into the thousands — enough to give astronomers their first meaningful statistics on other planetary systems, and to undermine the standard theory for good. Not only were there lots of exoplanet systems bearing no resemblance to ours, but the most commonly observed type of planet — a 'super-Earth' that falls between the sizes of our world and Neptune, which is four times bigger — does not even exist in our Solar System. Using our planetary family as a model, says astronomer of the , “has led to no success in extrapolating what's out there”."

"The fundamental necessity of space security is knowing where every satellite is and how it is behaving. ’s June 2020 doctrine calls this “space domain awareness.” Officially that awareness comes via a global network of sensors on satellites and telescopes on the ground that covers all orbits all the time and tracks everything bigger than 10 centimeters: 3,200 live satellites, as well as 24,000 nonfunctioning “zombies” and pieces of space debris that, in a collision with a satellite at 35,400 kilometers an hour, would cause a catastrophic breakup. The information is sent to Space Force’s 18th Space Control Squadron at the Combined Space Operations Center at in California. Data on the secret satellites are set aside, and the rest go into a public, free, online catalog called Space-Track, from which “conjunction notifications” are issued when two satellites look like they might get too close."

"The ’s first image looked like all hell. A month later, in late June 1990, the telescope's political shepherd, , found out what had gone wrong. He called some interested local astronomers—, Don Schneider, and particularly —and since astronomy in Princeton, New Jersey, usually involves food, he invited them to supper at a Route 206 strip-mall Chinese diner. He told them that NASA was about to announce that the telescope's perfect mirror had been ground to the perfectly wrong shape. Jim Gunn, who had designed and overseen the construction of the telescope's principal camera, had also seen the first image and had thought the problem might be fixed. But no, now Bahcall was telling him no, it was the mirror's shape, the telescope couldn't focus, the problem was irrevocable. … NASA, of course, pulled off an ingenious fix, installed by astronauts dangling improbably over the telescope up in space."

"Of the 100 or so scientists who have served on , Finkbeiner has interviewed 36. A few spoke anonymously, and others refused to talk at all. That reticence is not surprising, given that as much as three-quarters of Jason's work has consisted of classified military projects, some of them morally questionable. Like Errol Morris's film "The Fog of War," in which Robert McNamara painfully revisits Vietnam, Finkbeiner's book shows how even the smartest people with the noblest intentions can end up committing shameful acts."

"... Defense physics is generally ; it solves problems by applying other physicists' more basic work. Its result is usually not knowledge but technology. The adjective applied, when used by physicists, is not a compliment. Academic physics is pure research; its direction is determined by what academics are curious about and can get funding for. It is, of all the sciences, the most fundamental; its questions are about matter's basic nature and the forces that govern the known universe. Moreover, pure research is considered innocent, neither moral nor immoral. Applied research, whose technologies have potential for harm, comes accompanied by difficult moral decisions."

"We are so far from being able to move a good fraction of the population anywhere else. Even if Elon Musk and other private individuals manage to start sending humans to Mars, we may be a few hundred years away from putting any sizable population there—and we have to fix Earth right now. Eventually, if we’ve been irresponsible enough to create problems in our world, moving to a new one won’t necessarily solve the problem because we might do the same thing in the future."

"Looking from the astrobiology perspectives, life on Earth started early—just about as soon as it could. The more we learn about the origin of life, the more we realize it may be a likely outcome any time you have the right ingredients. However, if you look at the history of life on Earth, let’s say you put it on a twelve-hour clock, up until four o’clock it was just a world of microorganisms, from four to five o’clock that’s the era of plants coming onto land and animals and creatures in the sea, then after five o’clock until about ten o’clock this will be a world of only microorganisms again. So, in fact, our planet is in its late middle ages in terms of life on the surface. Then from ten o’clock until about midnight, the world will be completely desolate, devoid of life as the sun is running out of its nuclear fuel in the center and its outer atmosphere is expanding. The point is that our world has had big life for only a small slice of its existence and the portion of that which has had technology is even smaller. I think life is presumably abundant everywhere; the most common form is likely going to be microbial life. In addition, the distances are so vast that unless other civilizations have developed both a means of crossing those distances quickly and the desire to do so, plus the energy capability, I don’t know if we’ll see alien intelligence in our lifetime."

"If one cannot feel one’s way into people without, in actuality, representing the self as the arbitrator and judge of the other’s actions and possibilities, perhaps it is time to question what one wants from empathy. ... A more useful way to think about feelings requires attention to what it is that structures the ways in which feelings are imagined and read."

"Queer theory proposes to think identities in terms that place as a problem the production of normalcy and in terms that confound the intelligibility of the apparatuses that produce identity as repetition."

"We have defined colonialism as the forcible takeover of land and economy, and, in the case of European colonialism, a restructuring of non-capitalist economies in order to fuel European capitalism. This allows us to understand modern European colonialism not as some trans-historical impulse to conquer but as an integral part of capitalist development."

"s and massive s in the mass range 2–20 have been proposed as candidates to provide the in the halo of our galaxy."

""What is the Universe made of?" The question is one of the deepest unanswered mysteries in all of human existence. Solving the puzzle has been my life's work and is the hottest research topic in cosmology and particle physics today."

"... in the seventies the work of and Rubin ... looked at galaxies and found evidence for dark matter in every single one."

"... On my father’s side, I come from a family of artists and architects. My grandfather was a Bauhaus architect in Germany and my grandmother was a painter. When my father as a child was tinkering around in the basement with chemistry sets, his mother said to him, “You’ll never make a living in science. Why don’t you go into the family business, the arts?” Well, he defied that advice. He was actually a PhD student with Heisenberg in Göttingen, and then a post-doc with Enrico Fermi in Chicago. After that he went to Caltech where he switched to biology and became one of the founders of the field of molecular biology. He founded the department of molecular biology at the . My mother was from a town on the Swiss-German border called , and she actually got her PhD in biology at age 22."

"Israel imposed a land siege and a naval blockade hermetically sealing this coastal enclave, placing it on a subsistence diet just above starvation—relegating its conditions to “bare life”—and then systematically pummeling it with advanced weapons technologies in a bid to take the land without the people."

"Should I speak to you as an attorney? And tell you that when Israel withdrew its settlers and military infrastructure in 2005, that it maintained its effective control over the population registry, the skies, the underground water sources, the electromagnetic spheres, all points of ingress and outgress and thus remains an Occupying Power with the duty to protect its civilians? Israel has no right to self-defense against a territory that it occupies, no more than Portugal had it to maintain its hold on Mozambique and Angola."

"The devastation unloosed on Muslim societies in our day by fundamentalism . . . seems to be not merely the erasure of the living, oral, ethical, and human traditions of Islam but the literal destruction of and annihilation of the Muslims who are the bearers of those traditions. In Algeria, Iran, Afghanistan, and, alas, in Egypt, this narrow, violent variant of Islam is ravaging its way through the land."

"We lived in fact, throughout our childhoods, easily and unthinkingly crossing thresholds between one place and another—Ain Shams, Zatoun, our school—places that formed their own particular and different worlds with their own particular and different underlying beliefs, ideals, assumptions."

"“One is not born but rather becomes a woman,” goes Simone de Beauvoir’s famous dictum. I obviously was not born but became black when I went to England. Similarly, of course, I was not born but became a woman of color when I went to America."

"We all automatically assume that those who write and who put their knowledge down in texts have something more valuable to offer than those who simply live their knowledge and use it to inform their lives."

"Egyptians, for instance, might, with equal accuracy, define themselves as African, Nilotic, Mediterranean, Islamic, or Coptic. Or as all, or any combination of, the above. Or, of course, as Egyptian: pertaining to the land of Egypt."

"In a 1967 article, “Virgin Birth,” Leach astutely foreshadowed the reflexivity of the late 1970’s and 1980’s, calling attention to the fact that anthropologists call their own practice religion but assert that other peoples practice magic. In the present volume he presents the dramatic case of the fabrication of the Aryan invasion, which shows how profoundly the seemingly objective academic endeavors are affected by the mentalité of the culture to which they belong. Leach describes how cherished but erroneous assumptions in linguistics and anthropology were accepted without question. If the mentalité of the academic culture was in part responsible for the fabrication, geopolitics was even more responsible for upholding the Aryan invasion as history. The theory fit the Western or British vision of their place in the world at the time. The conquest of Asian civilization needed a mythical charter to serve as the moral justification for colonial expansion. Convenient, if not consciously acknowledged, was the Aryan invasion by a fair-skinned people, speaking the so-called Proto-Indo-European language, militarily conquering the dark- skinned, peasant Dasa (Dasyu), who spoke a non-European language and with whom the conquerors lived, as Leach puts it, in a “system of sexual apartheid.” The first civilization in India, thus, was built by the Aryan invaders. A remarkable case of Orientalism indeed."

"When directly confronted, in a polemical context, with historical and textual permission for the sexual use of unfree women, Muslim authors sometimes respond defensively, seeking to protect Islam’s reputation. It may be argued, for instance, that Islamic “slavery” bore no resemblance to harsh American chattel slavery. In this view, the Qur’anic permission for men to have sex with “what their right hands possess” was merely a way of integrating war captives into society. Sometimes, it is added that the captives would be “integrated” into the Muslim community through becoming the property of a specific man who would be responsible for them and their offspring. Whatever merit these arguments have in the context of inter-communal polemics and apologetics, however, they are insufficient for internal Muslim reflection. In particular, the notion that women would be integrated into society by bearing offspring to their owners or captors does not apply to the case of the Bani Mustaliq: the rationale for the captors to practice withdrawal, according to other accounts, is that they did not want to impregnate the women lest they spoil their chances to ransom them."

"For premodern Muslim jurists, as well as for those marginal figures who believe that the permission still holds, the category "rape" doesn't apply: ownership makes sex lawful; consent is irrelevant."

"They agreed unanimously that an enslaved female’s consent was never required for a marriage contracted by her owner. Al Shafii (d. 820) is typical: “He may marry off his female slave without her permission whether she is a virgin or non-virgin.”7 It strains logic to suggest that an enslaved woman is subject to being married off without her consent or against her will to whomever her owner chooses but that he cannot have sex with her himself without her consent... All accepted—sometimes tacitly, sometimes explicitly—that a man could practice withdrawal with his own female slave without seeking her permission"

"The permissibility of sex with the captive women was taken for granted by all the men involved, including the Prophet himself. (There is no indication of what the captured women thought, or the wives of the men involved.) Not only do the Prophet and the soldiers ignore the question of the women’s consent or lack thereof, but so does Algosaibi, focusing solely on contraception in his discussion of this hadith."

"Even if he marries off his own slave and no longer has lawful access to her, his having sex with her is a lesser transgression than zina¯. The jurists’ occasional affirmations that a married female slave whose owner nonetheless has sex with her is not to be punished is the closest any of these texts comes to considering the relevance of an enslaved woman’s consent. Notably, the issue emerges only because she is married to another man, a marriage for which jurists uniformly agree that her consent would have been unnecessary"

"A man’s intercourse with a female slave might constitute zina¯ only if she belongs to someone else."

"A surprising assertion about consent also appears in a recent monograph by a scholar of Islamic legal history who declares in passing that the Quran forbids nonconsensual relationships between owners and their female slaves, claiming that “the master–slave relationship creates a status through which sexual relations may become licit, provided both parties consent.” She contends that “the sources” treat a master’s nonconsensual sex with his female slave as “tantamount to the crime of zina [illicit sex] and/or rape.” Though I believe in the strongest possible terms that meaningful consent is a prerequisite for ethical sexual relationships, I am at a loss to find this stance mirrored in the premodern Muslim legal tradition, which accepted and regulated slavery, including sex between male masters and their female slaves."

"Hanafi texts extend the ruling on loss of support for physical absence to also uphold its converse:physical presence in the marital home suffices for support...A wife who remained in her husband's home but refused him sexually retained her claim to maintenance. Sexual refusal did not constitute nushuz, because it did not, in this view, make her sexually unavailable as long as she remained physically resent, he could have sexual access to her even aginst her will. Where the wife had legitimate grounds for sexual refusal, the situation was more complex. Abu Hanifa and his disciples disagreed as to what constituted legitimate grounds and, moreover, what the line was between enforceable rules and ethical guidelines. When a wife refused sex in order to claim an unpaid dower, Abu Hanifa supported her actions even after consummation. In this case, he held that "it is not lawful, and he sins [if he forces her]." According to Abu Yusuf and Muhammad al-Shaybani, who did not grant her the right to withhold herself for nonpayment of dower after consumation, the husband's forcing her "is lawful and he does not sin." A variant manuscript reads, "It is lawful and he sns," making a distinction between the legality and morality of the husband's actions...Still, while forcible intercourse might or might not be sinful if the wife had the moral high ground because of unpaid dower, if an unpaid dower was not at issue then the husband's right "to have sex with her against her will" went unquestioned. In this case, they agreed: "It is lawful, because she is a wrongdoer (zalima)." The wife's reproachable behavior justifies the husband's actions. Al-Khassaf, who reports these views, did not even raise the possibility that forced intercourse in these circumstances might be a sin."