There's a black-and-white photo from a 1920s beauty pageant in a gilt frame hanging above the desk in MIT Professor Lerna Ekmekcioglu's office. The Jazz Age image features white flapper girls in white dresses. There's an unsettling commonality among the women in the photo. Across the office, leaning on a wall near the entrance, is a piece of white backing board on which are pasted a series of images. The highly influential feminist publication and women's journal, 'Hay Gin,' and its founder and editor, Hayganush Mark, are at the collage's core, surrounded by images of socially marginalized women. The social and political distance between those pictures is part of a fascinating journey for Ekmekcioglu and her research into a feminism that centers both her Turkish-Armenian heritage and underrepresented women across the globe. Today, Ekmekcioglu, MIT's McMillan-Stewart Associate Professor of History, the director of MIT's Program in Women's and Gender Studies, and a professor since...
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