IAS Invited Lecture Series in Culture and Literary Studies – De-centering Queer Studies: Queer Histories on the Fringes of Europe and on the American South - Institute for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences and Humanities

IAS Invited Lecture Series in Culture and Literary Studies – De-centering Queer Studies: Queer Histories on the Fringes of Europe and on the American South

Organizers: prof. Magdalena Koch (Institute of Slavic Philology, Adam Mickiewicz University; mkoch@amu.edu.pl);

dr. Adriana Kovacheva – Event Coordinator (Institute of Slavic Philology, Adam Mickiewicz University; adriana.kovacheva@amu.edu.pl).

Lectures:

Examining Different Places, Archives, and Cultural Forms to Understand the Queer Social World in the United States

Amy L. Stone – professor, Sociology and Anthropology (Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Trinity University, Texas, USA). Their research has a central theme of belonging and marginalization in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) community in the United States with a focus on urban communities in the South and Southwest. Their current research focuses on two major projects: work on urban citizenship in the South and Southwest through the study of festivals and a longitudinal study of family and housing stability for LGBTQ youth. Former deputy editor of Gender & Society, a top-ranked gender studies journal.

Queer Theory travels to the East: How does Judith Butler’s dialectics work in Romania?

Bogdan Popa – professor, Literature and Cultural Studies (Transilvania University, Brașov, Romania, University of Cambridge, Indiana University). Fields of interest: studies of gender and sexuality; Marxism in Eastern Europe; film and aesthetics. Book publications: Shame: A Genealogy of Queer Practices in the Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). Nominated to the Northeast Victorian Studies Association’s Sonya Rudikoff Prize for the best first monograph on the Victorian period; Sex and The Capital: A Theory of Romanian Cinema [Sexul și Capitalul: O teorie a filmului românesc] (Bucharest: Romania, Tracus Arte); De-centering Queer Theory: Communist sexuality in the flow during and after the Cold War (Manchester University Press, Theory for a Global Age Series). Awarded the prize for the best book in cultural and literary theory by the Romanian Association for General and Comparative Literature.

Queer Stories from the Northern Fringe. Silence and Neglect

Tone Hellesund – professor, Cultural Studies (Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies and Religion, University of Bergen, Norway). Her main research interests are gender, sexuality and intimacy in the past and present, and she has empirically investigated various fields of non-normative lives. Currently her main focus is the history of sexuality and queer history in a broad sense. She is a leader of project QUEERDOM , focusing on queer domesticities and intimacies in Norway 1842–1972. She is also a part of several other Nordic projects, e.g. NordiQueer – A Nordic Queer Revolution? She is the founder of the Norwegian national archive for queer and LGBTQ+ history Skeivt arkiv.

Homosexuals in Bulgaria and the Communist Regime, 1944-1989

Mihail Gruev – professor, History (Department of History, St. Kliment Ohridski University in Sofia, Bulgaria). Fields of interest: modern Bulgarian history and ethnology of ethnic groups. His recent research is focused on the history of sexual minorities in Bulgaria. Author of the books Between the Pentacle and the Crescent: The Bulgarian Muslims and the Political Regime 1944 – 1959 (Sofia: Kota, 2003); The Revival Process. Muslim Communities and the Communist Regime (Sofia: Ciela, 2008); Plowed Syllables. Collectivization and Social Change in the Bulgarian Northwest (40s – 50s of the XX century) (Sofia: Ciela 2009). Chairman of the Bulgarian State Archives Agency.