Alfred University on Monday, March 30 will welcome Melina Packer, assistant professor of race, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse, for the thirty-first Elizabeth Hallenbeck Riley and Charles P. Riley Lectureship in Women's Studies.
Packer, the author of Toxic Sexual Politics: Toxicology, Environmental Poisons, and Queer Feminist Futures (NYU Press 2025), will speak at 4pm in Nevins Theater.
As co-author (with ecologist and evolutionary biologist Ambika Kamath) of Feminism in the Wild (MIT Press 2025), Packer has argued for a more self-aware understanding of science that recognizes how scientific research has often “projected human norms and values onto animals while seeking to understand them.” The result has been a shaping of “core concepts of animal behavior science and evolutionary biology according to the systems of power and the prejudices that dominate our world today.”
In discussing Feminism in the Wild, Packer and Kamath say they have “synthesized decades of research … to dismantle the foundations of mainstream animal behavior science and revolutionize our understanding of what it means to be an animal and what's possible in nature.”
Alfred University’s Elizabeth Hallenbeck Riley and Charles P. Riley Lectureship in Women's Studies is supported by alumni Pamela Riley Osborn '62 and Patricia A. Riley '65, and their sister Melissa Riley in memory of their mother and father, Elizabeth Hallenbeck Riley '363 and Charles P. Riley '35.
