Community
The Oakland Artists Project: A Digital Archive Created by Mills College Students
at Mills College (and beyond)
established June 2019
The Oakland Artists Project is a living archive that seeks to chronicle and present the lives and locations that have shaped Oakland’s emergence and ever-evolving role as a hub for creativity and innovation in the arts. As such, the site is an online encyclopedia that captures and makes available for a global audience the past, present, and emerging shape of literature, visual arts, music, dance, and theatrical performance in this unique city. As the project works to chronicle the depth and breadth of Oakland arts across forms, it by definition captures the complexity and diversity of this community, now and in the past.
Book Discussion with Koa Beck, White Feminism: From the Suffragettes to Influencers and Who They Leave Behind
hosted by the Mills College Alumnae Association
February 2021
Addressing today’s conversation about race, empowerment, and inclusion in America, Koa Beck, writer and former editor-in-chief of Jezebel, boldly examines the history of feminism, from the true mission of the suffragists to the rise of corporate feminism with clear-eyed scrutiny and meticulous detail. She also examines overlooked communities—including Native American, Muslim, transgender, and more—and their ongoing struggles for social change.
Kirsten Saxton on Social Media in the Literature Classroom
Our students’ facility with social media such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and personal blogging sites can be useful scaffolding for teaching the context, reception and circulation of literatures of different time periods.
Dr. Kirsten Saxton uses Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr to situate eighteenth-century political writing (the “pamphlet wars”) in her eighteenth-century literature course at Mills College. Dr. Saxton writes:
Our digital age in many ways resembles the sea change that the printing press brought to eighteenth-century England, and this assignment thus works well at the level of form as well as content.
Live! From the Library
Imagining Jane: Commemorating 200 Years of Jane Austen
at the Walnut Creek Public Library
July 2017
Mills College professor Dr. Kirsten T. Saxton lectures on Jane Austen’s life, works, and fame. How has Jane been imagined in the 200 years since her death? How and why does her work capture our imaginations? Come and celebrate Austen’s work as we consider the changing ways she and her work have been imagined, and why her books continue to inspire both scholarly and popular attention.
Bodies from the Library: Kirsten Saxton Presents The Incredible Crime by Lois Austen-Leigh
at the British Library
June 2017
Following its June 2017 republication, Kirsten Saxton speaks about Lois Austen-Leigh’s The Incredible Crime. This new edition includes an introduction by Professor Saxton which praises the novel as “breezy fun, with some excellent and generally good-natured sendups of university life: a cigarette-smoking brash young woman who can curse like a sailor, a Darcy-esque, as in rude and eventually adoring, academic love interest (which slightly raises my feminist hackles), smuggling, some Downton Abbey-worthy country-house life, and some really lovely Suffolk scenery.”
Raising the Bar
Fatal Women: Women And Murder In 18th-Century England
at Maggie McGarry’s SF
February 2015
As part of Raising the Bar’s 20 Talks, 20 Bars SF takeover, Kirsten Saxton lectures about (in)famous women murders at a local Irish pub.
Litquake 2009: Kirsten Saxton reads from Narratives of Women and Murder
at Litquake, San Francisco Public Library
October 2009
Kirsten Saxton reads from her book, Fatal Women: Narratives of Women and Murder at the 10th Annual Litquake Festival.
Kirsten T. Saxton 