LGBT Center and Women’s Center team up to bring speakers to OU.
Students will get a taste of what the LGBT Center and the Women’s Center does thanks to two speakers brought to campus on Thursday.
The history department and the LGBT Center are bringing Jennifer Brier, a professor from the University of Illinois of Chicago in honor of LGBT History Month.
Brier serves a joint appointment in the Program in Gender and Women’s Studies and the history department at the University of Illinois of Chicago. Her research focuses on the intersections between gender, sexuality, race and history, and she’s the author of Infectious Ideas: AIDS and U.S. Politics.
Brier’s talk will focus around her experience curating an exhibit on LGBT history at the Chicago History Museum that was on exhibit from 2011 to 2012.
“I’ll also talk a little bit about some of the successes and the struggles of having queer history represented in the Chicago History Museum,” Brier said. “What it meant for me and the woman (who helped me curate it) was to really have LGBT life and all of it’s diversity represented in the exhibition.”
Her lecture kicks off at 4:30 p.m. Thursday in Baker University Center 242.
She is currently working on putting together a mobile history gallery, “History Moves,” that will travel around Chicago.
Brier said that she thinks this lecture is relevant to students so they can find out about how public history can be part of their lives.
“People often think you participate in public history when you’re very young or elderly.”
In the evening, author J. Jack Halberstam will be giving the presentation “A Path So Twisted: Thinking Wildly With and Through Punk Feminisms.” His lecture, which will kick off the LGBTQ certificate, will begin at 7 p.m. Thursday in the Scripps Amphitheater.
This certificate inauguration is hosted by the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies program, the LGBT Center and the Women’s Center.
A reception will take place before the speech from 5:45 to 6:45 p.m. in the 1804 Lounge in Baker University Center.
Halberstam is a professor of American studies and ethnicity, gender studies and comparative literature at the University of Southern California. He’s the author of five books: Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, Female Masculinity, In A Queer Time and Place, The Queer Art of Failure and Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender and the End of Normal.
“I read a bunch of (Halberstram’s) stuff in grad school … we're all very excited about that starting and very excited about having such a big name here to help us celebrate,” said Sarah Jenkins, program coordinator for the Women’s Center.
Courses in the new certificate will begin in the spring.
“I think they are all going to have very different, interesting takes on their experiences with queer identity and how they have manifested themselves in their lives and I think it'll provide lots of different perspectives,” Jenkins said.
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