Friday 21 February 2025, 3.30pm - 5pm
Seminar Room, Radcliffe Humanities Building
Register via Google Forms.
Please note the lift is out of order until further notice. Apologies for any inconvenience this may cause.
Roderick Ferguson and Gayatri Gopinath, leading figures in queer of color critique, will discuss the challenges and possibilities facing the field in this moment of danger and crisis. They will reflect on the continued urgency of reckoning with questions of race and political economy in studies of gender and sexuality.
Speakers:
Roderick A. Ferguson is professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. He received his B.A. from Howard University and his Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego. An interdisciplinary scholar, his work traverses such fields as American Studies, gender studies, queer studies, cultural studies, African American Studies, sociology, literature, and education. He is the author of One-Dimensional Queer (Polity, 2019), We Demand: The University and Student Protests (University of California, 2017), The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (University of Minnesota, 2012), and Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (University of Minnesota, 2004). He is the co-editor with Grace Hong of the anthology Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (Duke University, 2011). He is also co-editor with Erica Edwards and Jeffrey Ogbar of Keywords of African American Studies (NYU, 2018). He is currently working on two monographs—In View of the Tradition: Art and Black Radicalism and The Bookshop of Black Queer Diaspora. Ferguson is the 2020 recipient of the Kessler Award from the Center for LGBTQ Studies. Ferguson’s teaching interests include the politics of culture, women of color feminism, the study of race, critical university studies, queer social movements, and social theory.
Gayatri Gopinath is Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, and the Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University. She works at the intersection of transnational feminist and queer studies, postcolonial studies, and diaspora studies, and is the author of two monographs: Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Duke University Press, 2005), and Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2018). She has published numerous essays on gender, sexuality, and queer diasporic visual art and culture in anthologies and journals such as Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, GLQ, and Social Text, as well as in art publications such as PIX: A Journal of Contemporary Indian Photography, Tribe: Photography and New Media from the Arab World, and ArtReview Asia.
Moderators:
Jasmine Baten is a researcher and student at Oxford University. She holds BAs in English Literature and Psychology and an MA in Media and Communications. She is currently pursuing an MSt in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies where her work centers South Asian women's resistance, focusing on agentic resistance by Bangladeshi women along with postcolonialism, memory, spatiality, and nationalism.
Avik Sarkar is a writer and artist from Boston. She graduated with distinction from Yale, where her thesis was funded by the Bruce L. Cohen LGBT Studies Research Award. Avik received a fellowship from the arts organization Visual AIDS for an archival project to be published in 2025. Her writing is also forthcoming in Lateral, the journal of the Cultural Studies Association. Avik is currently pursuing her master’s in women's, gender, and sexuality studies as a Clarendon Scholar at Oxford.
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