Feminist Biography and Social Justice: A Conversation

Join us for Feminist Biography and Social Justice: A Conversation, which brings together two authors Eve Kahn and Betty Caroli of recent biographies who use a feminist lens to explore the lives of women fighting for social justice in New York City and beyond.

Eve Kahn, in Queen of Bohemia Predicts Own Death: Gilded-Age Journalist Zoe Anderson Norris (Fordham UP, 2025), recovers the life a Kentucky-born belle turned fearless Manhattan journalist, who exposed slumlords and corrupt politicians and advocated for impoverished immigrants with wit and tenacity in her self-published periodical, The East Side. In A Slumless America: Mary K. Simkhovitch and the Dream of Affordable Housing (Oxford UP, 2026), Betty Caroli presents the first biography of a trailblazer in the settlement house movement and public housing and explores the historical roots of today’s housing crisis.

Kahn and Caroli will discuss how they came to write these lives; their approach to shaping their narratives; how the stories of Norris and Simkhovitch, and the issues of immigration and housing justice for which they fought, resonate in New York and the United States today; and the importance of a feminist perspective in life writing in the midst of the current charged debates about women’s role in society. Katie Rose Quandt will moderate this conversation.

Free and open to all, please register to attend. This event takes place Room 9205, CUNY Graduate Center.

Eve Kahn, an independent scholar, is a regular contributor to The New York Times and author of the award-winning monograph, Forever Seeing New Beauties: The Forgotten Impressionist Mary Rogers Williams, 1857-1907.

Betty Boyd Caroli, author of Ladybird and Lyndon: The Hidden Story of the Marriage That Made a President, is a graduate of Oberlin College and holds an MA in Mass Communication from Annenberg School of University of Pennsylvania, as well as a PhD in American Civilization from New York University. She studied at the Università Per Stranieri in Perugia, Italy, and the Salzburg Seminar in Austria. A Fulbright in Italy led her to teach at the British College in Palermo, the English School in Rome, and two branches of City University of New York (Queens College and Kingsborough Community College).

Katie Rose Quant, event moderator, is a journalist focused on criminal justice, incarceration, and inequality. Currently a Biography and Memoir MA (BAM) student at the CUNY Graduate Center, Rose Quant is working on a joint biography of six progressive-era women.

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities, the American Studies Certificate Program, and Women Writing Women’s Lives.

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Host or Publisher The Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center, CUNY