Conversations about Women was an ongoing public programming series that ran from 1993 through 1995. It was moderated by intellectual historian and New School women’s studies professor Gina Luria Walker, and consisted of a series of panels or lectures organized around a specific topic related to women’s issues, which changed each semester.

The Fall 1994 series, “Writing a Woman’s Life,” consisted of panel discussions between prominent women writers, with a focus on biographical and autobiographical writing about women (revisiting a theme from the first “Conversation about Women” in Spring 1993, which also focused on biographical writing). “Writing a Woman’s Life” was suggested as a theme and co-organized by the theater critic Margaret Croydon, and the series featured Croydon herself, along with novelist Mary Gordon, art critic Eleanor Munro, poet Meena Alexander, feminist Alix Kates Schulman, and poet and translator Nina Zivancevic as memoirists; and poet Nancy Cardozo Cowles, poet D.H. Melhem, literary critic Wendy Gimbel, and historian and sinologist Roxane Witke as biographers.

The Spring 1995 series, "Money Talks," consisted of single guests discussing the topic of women and finance.

Sources:

New School Office of Communications (1994). Conversations about Women series. George Calderaro New School Office of Communications records (NS.03.01.03, Box 4, Folder 47), The New School Archives and Special Collections.

The New School (1994). New School Bulletin 1994 Fall Vol. 52 No. 1 [course catalog]. New School Course Catalog Collection. New School Archives and Special Collections. /digital.archives.newschool.edu/index.php/Detail/objects/NS050101_ns1994fa>

The New School (1994). 75th Anniversary Celebration of the New School [press release]. George Calderado Records. New School Archives and Special Collections. /digital.archives.newschool.edu/index.php/Detail/objects/NS030103_000015>

Gina M. Luria Walker is a professor of women’s studies at The New School. An intellectual historian, Walker is best known for her work on late-18th-to-early-19th century English feminist intellectual Mary Hays, whose 1803 work Female Biography inspired Walker’s academic interest in the biographies of historical women.

Born Gina Luria in Brooklyn, New York, in 1942, Luria received her B.A. and M.A. from Columbia University before receiving her Ph.D. in 18th century literature from New York University in 1972 for her dissertation on Mary Hays. In 1976, she edited the reprints of 44 volumes of selected writing by 18th-to-19th century English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and members of her circle for Garland Publishing. After teaching at Northwestern University and Rutgers University, and working as a real estate consultant, she married her second husband, Chauncey Walker, in 1989. In 1993 Walker was hired by The New School’s Adult Division, and ran the Conversations About Women special lecture program, a series of panels and lectures on women’s issues, with a special focus on women’s writing and women writers, until the series’ end in 1995. By 1998, she was made chair of the social sciences department of the university's Adult Division.

In 2009, Walker created the Female Biography Project, a group of scholars attempting to investigate and revise the entries of Mary Hay’s original Female Biography. Once this updated edition was published in 2013, the Female Biography Project became Project Continua, an online archive of biographies of historical women. In 2022, this again changed its name to The New Historia.

Sources:

Ellen Moors, “Vindicating Mary Wollstonecraft". The New York Review of Books, February 19. 1976. Accessed July 16, 2024, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1976/02/19/vindicating-mary-wollstonecraft/

“Gina Luria Weds Chauncey Walker”. The New York Times, July 10, 1989. Accessed July 16, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/1989/07/10/style/gina-luria-weds-chauncey-walker.html

Gina Luria Walker. “Core Convictions: Women, Epistemological Authority, and the Canon”. Lecture. Temple University, Philadelphia. March 17, 2018. Accessed July 16, 2024, /docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vTXim2Pk7tm9JgRAmEvwuN14z31iIZmMLB16FI6Jw78y7PmMMiKOx2K8NUMDkaZ_Oop_zIOrpuqMP3i/pub>

New School Office of Communications (1994). Conversations about Women series. George Calderaro New School Office of Communications records (NS.03.01.03, Box 4, Folder 47), The New School Archives and Special Collections.

The New School (1992). New School Bulletin 1993 Spring Vol. 50 No. 4 [course catalog]. New School Course Catalog Collection. New School Archives and Special Collections. https://digital.archives.newschool.edu/index.php/Detail/objects/NS050101_ns1993sp