Lecture Series

The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Program at the University of Maryland is pleased to announce the schedule of events for the Spring 2012 lecture series.

CONTACT: Tenth Annual Lecture Series in LGBT Studies

Contact. Of bodies, worlds, orders, organisms. Of people, modes of being, ways of seeing. "Life is at its most rewarding, productive, and pleasant when large numbers of people understand, appreciate, and seek out interclass contact and communication conducted in a mode of good will," declares Samuel R. Delany in Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. Contact is a theme that resonates throughout queer studies of intimacy, alterity, temporality, and globalization. Join us for a provocative series of interdisciplinary conversations as we celebrate ten years of LGBT Studies at Maryland. Make contact with us.

All events are free and open to the public. Off-campus visitors may find directions to campus and information about parking here.

NAYAN SHAH
Stranger Intimacy, Transience, and Unsettling History
5:00 p.m. Monday, February 13, 2012
Ulrich Recital Hall, Tawes Hall

Nayan Shah is associate professor of history at the University California at San Diego. His most recent book is Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North American West. He is also the author of Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown and an editor of GLQ.

KARA KEELING
The Queer Place of Space: Afrofuturism and Speculations on "Africa"
5:00 p.m. Thursday, March 1, 2012
Ulrich Recital Hall, Tawes Hall

Kara Keeling is associate professor of critical studies and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Keeling is author of The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense and of numerous articles published in journals such as GLQ, Qui Parle, The Black Scholar, and Women and Performance.

ELIZABETH A. POVINELLI
On Social, and Other, Forms of Suicide
4:30 p.m. Thursday, April 5, 2012
Ulrich Recital Hall, Tawes Hall

Elizabeth A. Povinelli is professor of anthropology at Columbia University. Povinelli is author of four books, including, most recently, Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism. From 2000–2004, she edited the journal Public Culture.

SAMUEL R. DELANY
Reading and Conversation with ROBERT REID-PHARR
5:00 p.m. Friday, April 20, 2012
Ulrich Recital Hall, Tawes Hall

Samuel R. Delany is professor of English and creative writing and director of the graduate creative writing program at Temple University. Delany is an award-winning author with over twenty novels and several books of stories, essays, criticism, and autobiography in a career that spans nearly 40 years. He will be reading from his new novel, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders.

Robert Reid-Pharr is Distinguished Professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City of New York. He is the author of three books, including, most recently, Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual and of a recent article in American Literature, "Clean: Death and Desire in Samuel R. Delany's Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand."

Note: This is the keynote event for the DC Queer Studies Symposium, “DELANY AT 70,” April 20, 2012, at the University of Maryland.

Q&A and reception to follow each lecture.

To obtain a souvenir copy of the poster, please visit the LGBT Studies Office in 2417 Marie Mount Hall.

We are grateful to the Office of Undergraduate Studies for its support of the series. Additional sponsors include the Office of University Diversity; the Graduate School; the departments of American Studies, English, Women’s Studies, and African American Studies; the Asian American Studies Program; the Nathan and Jeanette Miller Center for Historical Studies; and the LGBT Equity Center.

Speaker Series Archive 2003-2011