Events

Charles Walker, distinguished professor of history, University of California, Davis, is a leading scholar of Latin America, the Andes, and Peru, whose work in the fields of colonialism, environmental history, and human rights has placed him at the forefront of the historical discipline over the last two decades. He directed the Hemispheric Institute on the Americas at UC Davis for over a decade and was also the director of Global Centers for Latin America & the Caribbean (Global Affairs). He held the MacArthur Foundation Endowed Chair in International Human Rights from 2015-2020. He has published widely on Peruvian history, truth commissions, and historiography, in English and Spanish. His 2014 Harvard University Press book, The Tupac Amaru Rebellion, was named one of the best books of the year by the Financial Times and also won the Hundley Prize from the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association. His Witness to the Age of Revolution has won awards in the United States and Peru and has been translated into Spanish and Quechua. 

Human Rights and the Carceral State: Peru’s Experience of Political Violence

Thursday, February 5, 5 p.m. 

Klingenstein Browsing Room, Neilson Library

On March 2, 1982, the Maoist guerrilla movement the Shining Path stormed the Ayacucho jail in the Peruvian Andes and freed approximately 90 of their comrades and 160 common prisoners. Hours later, the humiliated police took revenge by murdering three Shining Path suspects who were convalescing in the nearby hospital. Among the many repercussions of this shocking evening, the subject of the book that Professor Walker has just finished, was the Peruvian government's decision to streamline the construction of modern penitentiaries and the renovation of dozens of jails.

In this talk, Professor Walker seeks to link these events with the global phenomenon of the carceral state. Since the late 20th century, governments across the globe have incarcerated a growing percentage of the population, using harsh (and expensive) penitentiaries to isolate these prisoners from society. Critics have pointed out the biases in who is imprisoned in these penitentiaries as well as the corruption behind their construction and maintenance. In the United States, race plays a major role. Professor Walker strives to link this "night that changed Peru" with this expansion of the punitive and vigilant state.

The Shining Path (1980-2000) and the Long Shadow of Violence in Peru: Reconsiderations on Militancy, Resistance, and Terrorism

Tuesday, March 3, 2026, 5 p.m

Klingenstein Browsing Room, Neilson Library

Peru's Internal Armed Conflict raged from 1980 to 2000, prompting the death of at least 70,000 people. Most studies of the Peruvian Maoists correctly stress their differences with other insurgencies across the Americas and even the globe. The Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission underlined the fact that rural, Indigenous people constituted the majority of the victims. In this presentation, Professor Walker seeks to answer key questions about the insurgency and its impact in contemporary Peru:

• Why did young people join the movement, particularly women, and what was the allure and ultimately the cost? 
• How did this conflict affect others seeking social change in less violent fashion?
• How does the Peruvian case help us consider the concepts of resistance and terrorism? 

Provost reception immediately following in the Skyline Reading Room.

Reading Group

The Surrendered: Reflections by a Son of Shining Path 

Smith College faculty and staff and Five College faculty are invited to join Charles Walker for a discussion of The Surrendered: Reflections by a Son of Shining Path [italic] about Peruvian public intellectual José Carlos Agüero. Walker and his colleague Michael Lazzara translated this work, adding an introduction and an interview with Agüero.

When Agüero was a child, the government imprisoned and executed his parents, who were members of Shining Path. In The Surrendered, Agüero reflects on his parents' militancy and the violence and aftermath of Peru's internal armed conflict. He examines his parents' radicalization, their lives as guerrillas, and his tumultuous childhood, which was spent in fear of being captured or killed, while grappling with the complexities of public memory, ethics and responsibility, human rights, and reconciliation. Much more than a memoir, The Surrendered is a disarming and moving consideration of what forgiveness and justice might mean in the face of hate.

The discussion will take place 11 a.m. - 1 p.m. on Friday, April 3 at the Kahn Institute, Smith College. Please RSVP by Friday, March 20 and a copy of the book will be sent to you.

Kahn Liberal Arts Institute Short-term Project

Thursday and Friday, February 5 and 6, 2026

Political Violence, Authoritarianism, and Social Mobilization in the Americas — Past, Present, and Future

Ruth and Clarence Kennedy Visiting Professor

Spring 2025

Valerie Traub is the Adrienne Rich Distinguished University Professor Emerita of English and women’s and gender studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns (2015), The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (2002), and Desire & Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (1992, reissued 2014). Both Thinking Sex and The Renaissance of Lesbianism won the Best Book award from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women. In addition, she has edited several collections, including The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment (2016), which received the Ronald H. Bainton Prize for Best Reference Work in 2016. Her latest co-edited collection is Ovidian Transversions: Iphis and Ianthe, 1350–1650, while forthcoming is another co-edited collection, Reproductive Justice After Roe: Lessons from the Premodern Classroom. Her current project is Mapping Humanity in the Early Modern West: Classification, Norms, Biopolitics, which examines how gender, race, and sexuality in cartographic and anatomical illustration comprise a prehistory of the concept of the normal.

Nancy Whittier is Sophia Smith Professor of Sociology at Smith College, where she has been teaching since 1992. Her research examines the organization and consequences of social movements, focusing on organizing by or for feminists, queer people, survivors of child sexual abuse, and opponents of gendered violence. She has studied how participating in activism shapes people’s future work, personal life, and activism in other movements. She has examined how activists work to transform the emotions of participants and the general public, and how they work to change cultural meanings and identities of disadvantaged groups (such as women, feminists, lesbians, or survivors of sexual assault). She has also studied how activists shape federal policy, which results from shifting power among allies and opponents and from cultural processes inside Congress and agencies that establish expertise and construct knowledge and emotional resonance for issues and policies. Overall, her work emphasizes the importance of identity, culture, and emotion for understanding what is accomplished both inside movement organizations and in the state.

Her most recent publication, “Theorizing Gender and Social Movements Beyond the Binary,” rethinks one of her earliest contributions – theorizing how gender shapes social movements – with an updated model of gender that moves beyond a binary, static model. She is currently working on a project tracing U.S. social movements around gender and sexuality from the 1980s to the present that aims to show how both social movements and state structures established in the 1980s laid the groundwork for the subsequent decades.

She is the author of Frenemies: Feminists, Conservatives, and Sexual Violence (Oxford University Press, 2018), The Politics of Child Sexual Abuse: Emotions, Social Movements, and the State (Oxford University Press, 2009), Feminist Generations (Temple, 1995), Statistics for Social Understanding (with Tina Wildhagen and Howard Gold), co-editor of Social Movements: Identities, Culture, and the State (Oxford University Press, 2002, with David S. Meyer and Belinda Robnett) and Feminist Frontiers (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020, with Verta Taylor and Leila Rupp), and author of numerous articles on social movements, gender, and sexual violence.