Featuring Dartmouth and diversity-themed trivia, plus social time after.
Q: Which US politician, who was openly gay, was fundamental in defeating Proposition 6, which would’ve made it illegal for members of the queer community to teach in schools?
Join us at 7:30pm for trivia and awesome tunes with your host, David Blum ’93, of Great Big Trivia. Each round begins easy and gets progressively more difficult, so whether you’re a casual trivia player or seasoned trivia buff there’s something for everyone!
We’re playing for fun (and PRIDE), but like traditional pub trivia we’ll keep score.
You’ll submit answers via a Google Form and the winner will receive some DGALA swag!
Please join DGALA and Women of Dartmouth for a virtual alum book club event, held in partnership with alumna-owned Still North Books & Bar in Hanover.
We will hear from Torrey Peters GR’13, whose new book Detransition, Baby is about what happens at the emotional, messy, vulnerable corners of womanhood that platitudes and good intentions can’t reach. Torrey will be joined in conversation by Sheila Hicks-Rotella ’04. Reading the book is encouraged, but not required to attend.
In Detransition, Baby, Peters brilliantly and fearlessly navigates the most dangerous taboos around gender, sex, and relationships, gifting us a thrillingly original, witty, and deeply moving novel. Kirkus Reviews calls the debut, “Smart, funny, and bighearted. Trans women will be matching their experiences against Reese’s, but so will cis women—and so will anyone with an interest in the human condition.” And Garth Greenwell says, “It’s the smartest novel I’ve read in ages. Peters manages to be utterly savage and lacerating while also conveying endlessly expanding compassion. It’s kind of a miracle.” Peters is set to write the pilot episode of the TV adaptation for Detransition, Baby with Grey’s Anatomy writer-producers Joan Rater and Tony Phelan lined up to serve as showrunners on the half-hour dramedy adaptation of the novel.
Torrey Peters GR’13 is the author of the bestselling novel Detransition, Baby (Random House, 2021), which was longlisted for the Women’s Prize and was a Roxane Gay’s Audacious Book Club Pick. She is also the author of the novellas Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones and The Masker. Peters holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and a Masters in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth. She splits her time between Brooklyn and an off-grid cabin in Vermont.
Sheila Hicks-Rotella ’04 has worked in college and independent school admissions and financial aid for 15 years. At Dartmouth she played rugby and was a Women’s and Gender Studies major (more or less in that order). She graduated from the Harvard Graduate School of Education with a degree in School Leadership in 2009. She lives in The Bronx with her wife Emily, a technology entrepreneur, and their two young children. In her spare time she writes comedy and organizes play dates (which means something different than it did 20 years ago).
Zoom in as a panel of DGALA alums answers questions from the existing LGBTQ+ students of the campus group Within. Panelists have been selected based on Within’s survey of careers that are of the most interest. “We have lots of business presentations, so we’d like to hear more from DGALA alums in government, non-profits and the performing arts.” In addition to the panel discussion, attendees can ask questions and receive responses from alums participating. Chloe Fugle ’23 and Lee Merkle-Raymond ’86 will moderate.
DGALA and the Dartmouth College Fund are excited to be partnering for this live online opportunity for DGALA alums to meet two of our DGALA/DCF scholars.
Join us for this Zoom meeting on Wednesday, May 5 at 5pm (EDT) to hear from seniors Colin Goodbred and Jess Zhang as they share moments from their Dartmouth experience. To receive your personalized link, please register via the email distributed to DGALA members. Need help registering? Email dartgala@gmail.com.
Colin Goodbred D’21 Colin Goodbred will share stories from his experience with the triathlon team, testifying against anti-trans legislation in NH, and how his classes have shaped the person he is today.
HOMETOWN: Brentwood, TN MAJOR: Quantitative Social Science
Jess Zhang D’21 Jess Zhang will speak about her leadership role with Phi Tau (a gender-inclusive Greek house) and the project she created with the Class of 1961 arts initiative grant.
On October 15th of this year, DGALA’s board of directors, together with the Dartmouth Asian Pacific American Alumni Association (DAPAAA) Executive Board and concerned DAPAAA Alumni, wrote to President Hanlon, urging the College to provide institutional backing and long-term funding for Dartmouth’s relatively new Consortium of Studies in Race, Migration, and Sexuality (RMS Consortium). Of our Ivy League peers, Dartmouth remains the sole institution without a centralized race/ethnicity/ migration studies program, and there remains a notable lack of funding in the areas of sexuality and gender studies. DGALA believes that increased investment in this effort is a necessary step toward addressing systemic inequalities, and preparing our students to identify, tackle, and dismantle inequities across the globe.
The Consortium is directed by Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Professor Eng-Beng Lim, who was instrumental in starting the program and already making it a significant presence on campus during what is now its second year of operation. The Consortium is co-directed by Professor Kimberly Juanita Brown, and has 19 founding faculty members across the college’s departments. Notably, Matthew Garcia, professor of history and Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies and founding RMS faculty member is co-chairing the search committee for Dartmouth’s first Senior Vice President of Diversity and Equity.
DGALA and DAPAAA leaders led an awareness campaign with all alumni prior to Alumni Council that resulted in a significant number of emails about RMS being shared with alumni councilors and the Alumni Liaison committee. RMS was brought up repeatedly during Alumni Council. We hope to continue to elevate the conversation.
As a result of emails to President Hanlon and the Dean of the Faculty Professor Elizabeth Smith, the leaders have now scheduled an early November meeting with Professor Smith, whose office provided initial support for the Consortium and could be instrumental in assuring its continuation and growth.
Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Professor Eng-Beng Lim
To learn more about the RMS Consortium, DGALA recently conducted a virtual interview with Professor Lim, who is Dartmouth’s first tenured professor specializing in LGBTQIA-related academics.
Would you tell us more about the Consortium?
Thank you so much for your inquiry. I have had several meetings with the leadership of DAPAAA and DGALA concerning RMS’s status and future.
RMS is driven primarily by faculty and student interest on questions of justice (economic, social, racial, gender, sexual, migrant). It has tremendous buy-in from our campus community, and has a national presence with over twenty top scholars on our advisory board.
In terms of the Consortium’s priorities, we are putting together the following:
An interdisciplinary minor
Strengthening our Undergraduate Scholars and Fellows program (we recruited 30 this Fall)
Weekly Faculty workshops and salons, “Putting Radical Thought to Action.”
Humanities Institute on Transnational and Decolonial Ethnic Studies
Consortium lectures
Weekly newsletter (that you can subscribe by writing to us).
Our curriculum is aligned with intersectional and decolonial approaches to questions race, migration and sexuality.
My sense is that new initiatives in academia can be a challenge to advance. What is the current status and future hopes for the Consortium?
In terms of the College’s support, Dean Smith provided generous seed funding to establish the Consortium on May 6, 2019. Our agreement was for the funding to last 12-18 months, and to then find sustainable funding after that. In the meantime, I have secured additional funding from the Leslie Center [at Dartmouth] to augment her initial infusion of funds. We hope to become a Center and/or to find reliable sources of funding. Institutional priorities and fundraising are areas that are outside of my control or honestly, understanding. However, lots of alums have expressed support for RMS.
Because the work we do as a Consortium is also a matter of faculty volunteerism, we can do this work regardless of the College’s fundraising efforts. Having structural permanency would obviously have greater impact across the board on campus, and facilitate this work better. I can say in the areas where faculty have control, that is around RMS curricular re-thinking and programming for example, there is immense excitement about the Consortium across the campus. We are currently well positioned to make transformative contributions to the College in intersectional and decolonial studies of race, migration, and sexuality and their critical surround. Also, in areas of under- or zero representation, such as Asian American Studies and queer studies, RMS will try to fill in the gap and provide small offerings in and through RMS.
How does the Consortium compare with what other peer institutions are doing?
No other peer institution has a center that incorporates queerness and sexuality as part of their thinking on race. And speaking of race, we are the only Ivy League campus without a center on race and ethnicity, let alone gender and sexuality! We are on fallow ground indeed.
If you would like to express your support for the RMS Consortium and for Dartmouth to provide institutional backing and long-term funding to RMS, please write to the Alumni Liaison Committee at alc@dartmouth.edu. Those emails are shared with the Board of Trustees.
DGALA | Dartmouth LGBTQIA+ Alum Association 
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