A new initiative will begin on Thursday, Feb. 23, with the first session of The Diversity Research Café, which will seek to build an inclusive community of full-time and adjunct faculty members and graduate students from colleges and departments across the University of Delaware.

The initial session will be held in the Memorial Hall Dome and feature Sylvanna Falcón, who is associate professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California Santa Cruz and the award-winning author of Power Interrupted: Antiracist Feminist Activism Inside the United Nations. Falcón will speak about “Reading Power Backward and Forward.”

Those planning to attend are asked to RSVP by Feb. 13 to pswhite@udel.edu. Light refreshments will be served at the event.

Developed by the Department of Women and Gender Studies, the initiative plans to hold a series of three cafés each semester, beginning this spring, designed to incubate new ideas and encourage productive conversation.

Each session will feature a presentation by invited scholars from UD or other institutions, followed by open, informal and relaxed discussions.

Organizers expect the cafés to promote interdisciplinary exchanges on topics broadly related to diversity, gender, women and sexuality. Each session will allow faculty and graduate students whose work and teaching involves the study of those subjects an opportunity to deepen their level of engagement with trends in the field in ways that could enhance their work and broaden their focus.

The program is expected to generate new interests, new curricular offerings, insights into different pedagogical approaches, research ideas and even collaborative faculty projects for participants.

Each café will meet from 4-5:30 p.m. in locations that will be announced before the session. Other speakers and topics this semester will be:

• April 6 — Ben Fleury-Steiner, University of Delaware Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice, “Online Masculine Violence”; and

• May 3 — Katie King, University of Maryland, “The State of Women’s and Gender Studies.”