Keynote Address

Friday, May 2, 8:00 p.m.

Cynthia Cohen

Executive Director of the Slifka Program in Intercommunal Coexistence
International Center for Ethics, Justice, and Public Life
Brandeis University

Acting Together on the World Stage:
Reflections on a Feminist Education and Peacebuilding

Cynthia Cohen is the Executive Director of the Slifka Program in Intercommunal Coexistence at Brandeis University, where she directs an on-going inquiry into the contributions of the arts and cultural work to coexistence and reconciliation. She is currently directing a multi-year inquiry into performance and peacebuilding, facilitating a dialogue among international theatre artists and peace studies scholars that will culminate in an anthology and dvd. She has been at Brandeis since 1997, based at the university's International Center for Ethics, Justice, and Public Life, where her position includes teaching, research and convening gatherings of international scholars and practitioners.

Prior to her work at Brandeis, Cohen received her Ph.D. in Education at the University of New Hampshire, where she studied with Barbara Houston, Ann Diller and Paula Salvio. She also holds degrees in urban studies from the Massachusetts Institute for Technology and in ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University. She coordinated the UNH President's Commission on the Status of Women from 1990 - 1992. From 1980 - 1990, she directed a community-based oral history center in the Boston area, where she worked with artists, scholars and community people to develop a model of inclusive anti-racist oral history programming. While there, she co-directed a public humanities project entitled A Passion for Life: Stories and Folk Arts of Palestinian and Jewish Women.

Cohen has also worked as an activist in the Boston-area movement addressing violence against women, where she was a member of the collective that ran the Elizabeth Stone House, a shelter for women in emotional crisis, and a founding member of the Coalition of Massachusetts Battered Women's Service Groups. Additionally, she has worked as a coexistence facilitator with people from opposing sides of conflicts in the Middle East and Sri Lanka.

Her publications include Working with Integrity: A Guidebook for Peacebuilders Asking Ethical Questions; an on-line anthology Recasting Reconciliation through Culture and the Arts; and, in the NWSA Journal "Removing the Dust from Our Hearts: The Search for Reconciliation in the Narratives of Palestinian and Jewish Women."

She divides her time between the Boston area and Barrington, New Hampshire, where she lives with her partner Ann Morgan.