Listen to a podcast interview with Jen Manion on What's Left of Queer Theory Now?

In partnership with the LGBT Center, the Alice Paul Center welcomes Jen Manion, Associate Professor of History at Amherst College. Jen received a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in history from Rutgers University. Their 2004 collection, co-edited with Jim Downs, titled Taking Back the Academy!: History of Activism, History as Activism, is a collection of essays about social justice movements and the struggle to document and pass on these histories. Their 2015 book, Liberty's Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America, shows how racialized and gendered ideas about sexuality, freedom, and resistance shaped the creation of the penitentiary system in the U.S. Jen tweets at @activisthistory and posts stories related to contemporary mass incarceration at libertysprisoners.tumblr.com

This talk explores how the language scholars use in crafting histories simultaneously reveals and constitutes an epistemology of the LGBTQ past. It will chiefly grapple with how a modern lexicon informed by transgender studies and community practice offers scholars an expansive new way of understanding the lives and histories of a group designated by gay and lesbian historians in the 1970s as “passing women.”

Cosponsored by: The McNeil Center for Early American Studies and Department of History

This event is free and open to the public.