PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — After a significant renovation project this past summer and early fall, one of Brown’s most storied buildings, Pembroke Hall, has reopened as the dedicated home of the University’s Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women.
The move brings together under one roof all of the center’s offerings, including an undergraduate concentration and a graduate certificate program in gender and sexuality studies, the Pembroke Seminar, the Pembroke Center Archives and the center’s feminist cultural studies journal, differences.
“This moment is kind of like a homecoming,” said center director Leela Gandhi, a professor of humanities and English. “It has symbolic as well as functional meaning for the center.”
In recent years, the Pembroke Center shared Pembroke Hall with the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, which relocated to Andrews House in Fall 2024, while the center’s archives and many of its faculty and staff offices were in Alumnae Hall.
“Now, we will be able to easily knock on a door and run ideas by each other,” Gandhi said. “The renovation offers us this wonderful opportunity for collaboration, and I think we’re going to grow by leaps and bounds because of it.”
Funded by a generous gift from Shauna M. Stark, a member of Brown’s Class of 1976, the renovation has revitalized the Tudor Revival-style building into a modern and functional space that also preserves its historic character.
Pembroke Hall was completed in 1897 as the first building of the Women’s College, which was later renamed Pembroke College and subsequently merged with the men’s college of Brown University in 1971. Its original construction was made possible through the fundraising efforts of the Rhode Island Society for the Collegiate Education of Women, under the leadership of the organization’s president, Sarah Doyle, for whom Brown’s Sarah Doyle Center for Women and Gender is named.
“Built entirely with funds raised by women, the hall has long served and continues to serve as a monument to women at Brown,” Gandhi said.
The renovation involved significant upgrades to the building, including the creation of a kitchen and lounge/study spaces, an exhibition area, an archive storage and workspace, and a reading room.
Gandhi said she envisions the new spacious, light-filled kitchen to be more than just a place for faculty and staff to eat lunch. “My dream is to use the space to host brown-bag lunch talks and other events,” she said.
The third-floor multipurpose room, which is often used by departments across the University for events including speaker series and book talks, has been upgraded with enhanced acoustics, audiovisual systems and lighting, and new furnishings.
