CSGS 30th Anniversary Symposium

Thursday, April 9 at 5:00pm

Keynote address and 2026 Lauren Berlant Memorial Lecture

Alexis Pauline Gumbs
“This Tree: Black Feminist Ecologies and the Long Game”

Swift Hall - 1025 E 58th Street, 3rd Floor Lecture Hall

In this interactive keynote lecture Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs will draw on archival and published writing of key 20th century Black feminist writers to offer some of the lessons of Black feminist ecological practice most relevant for gender and sexuality study and liberation within and beyond academic institutions. 

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a Queer Black Feminist Love Evangelist and an aspirational cousin to all life. She is/they are the author of several books, most recently Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde and the award-winning Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals. She is/they are the co-founder of the Mobile Homecoming Trust, an intergenerational experiential living library of Black LBGTQ brilliance.

RSVP for the keynote address.

Register to attend via Zoom.

Friday, April 10

Gender and Sexuality Studies: Now More Than Ever
CSGS – 5733 S University Ave

Register to attend the symposium.

Register to attend via Zoom.

9:00-9:30am |  Welcome Remarks and a History of CSGS
 

9:30-11:00am | Panel 1: Embodied Thought and Practice

Moderated by Kaneesha Parsard, Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature

How might creative work, activism, or other embodied practices open up alternative avenues for thinking gender and sexuality? for creating the conditions of possibility for a more liberatory socio-political order?

• Qudsiyyah Shariyf* Deputy Director, Chicago Abortion Fund
  “Embodied Knowledge of Abortion Fund Work”
  Qudsiyyah Shariyf (she/they) is an organizer, birthworker, and reproductive justice advocate. Her strategic vision was instrumental in expanding CAF’s capacity to provide logistical, financial, and emotional support to people in need of abortion care in Chicago, Illinois, and beyond. Qudsiyyah is a leading voice in the abortion access movement, working to build a world where everyone has access to the resources, care and support they need to thrive.
• Jack Schneider* Assistant Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
  “City in a Garden: Queer Art and Activism in Chicago”
  Jack Schneider has organized many exhibitions including City in a Garden: Queer Art and Activism in Chicago (2025-2026). Schneider is co-director of Prairie, an independent exhibition space he founded with Tim Mann in 2017 that focuses on emerging and experimental artists. Schneider holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MA in Art History from the University of Chicago.
• Touhfat Mouhtare Author 
  “Body Language: Rewriting History Through Body and Landscape Analogies in Persian and Comorian Poetry”
  Touhfat Mouhtare is the author of Âmes suspendues (2011), a collection of novellas, and Vert cru (2018). Her novel, Le feu du milieu (2022), has recently been translated into English as The Fire Within, and her most recent work, Choses qui arrivent (2025) was awarded the Prix Littéraire de la Renaissance Française.
   

11:15am-12:45pm | Panel 2: States of the Fields

Moderated by Rochona Majumdar George V. Bobrinskoy Professor of South Asian Languages and Civilizations and Cinema and Media Studies

This panel will engage with the many exciting new directions in which feminist (and gender, and sexuality) studies have moved since the 1990s.

• Aren Z. Aizura Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Gender Women and Sexuality Studies, University of Minnesota
  “Trans Studies at the Abyss: Rejecting Recognition in the Era of Bans and Bathroom Bills”
  Aren Aizura is associate professor in Gender Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota. His first book Mobile Subjects: transnational imaginaries of gender reassignment (Duke UP, 2018) won the Sylvia Rivera Award for Transgender Studies. He is the co-editor of the Transgender Studies Reader 2 and Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies (NYU Press, 2021). His work has appeared in numerous journals and books, including Transgender Studies Quarterly and South Atlantic Quarterly. 
• Durba Mitra Richard B. Wolf Associate Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Harvard University
  “Global Gender Studies in the Time of Gender Ideology”
  Durba Mitra’s scholarship brings together feminist political thought, sexuality studies, and global intellectual history. Mitra’s new book, The Future That Was: A History of Third World Feminism Against Authoritarianism (Princeton University Press, 2026) offers a pathbreaking history of women from former colonies in South Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and women of color in the US who wrote Third World feminism into being, catalyzing a momentous expansion of knowledge about women, gender, and sexuality that has transformed emancipatory politics across the globe. Her award-winning book, Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Origins of Modern Social Thought (Princeton University Press, 2020) reveals how the control of feminized sexuality was central to the making of the modern study of social life in colonial India. She has published essays on gender, sexuality, and the politics of knowledge in multiple public venues, including Harper's Bazaar and Public Books.
• Lynn M. Thomas Director of the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, Giovanni and Amne Costigan Endowed Professor, History, the University of Washington, Seattle
  “Entangled Feminisms in East Africa and Elsewhere”
  Lynn M. Thomas is a historian of politics and gender in East and Southern Africa. Her first book, Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya (University of California Press, 2003) examined how abortion, female initiation, and childbirth became the subject of intense debate and intervention in colonial and, after 1963, postcolonial Kenya. Her two co-edited volumes,The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization (Duke University Press, 2008) and Love in Africa (University of Chicago Press, 2009), and second book Beneath the Surface: A Transnational History of Skin Lighteners (Duke University Press, 2020), explored the emergence of consumer capitalism, mass media, and new conceptions of gender, race, and intimacy in Africa and beyond. Her current book project is a global history of abortion technologies, practices, and politics between Kenya and the United States since the late 1960s.

2:00-3:30pm | Panel 3: Urgencies and Predicaments

Moderated by Kristen Schilt, Associate Professor of Sociology

This panel explores some of the very material challenges facing women and LGBTQ populations, as well as attacks on education and freedom of expression.

• Lisa L. Moore Archibald A. Hill Professor of English and Professor of Women's and Gender Studies and the Director of the LGBTQ Studies Program, The University of Texas at Austin
  “Flying High and Falling Fast: Queer and Feminist Studies and Activism at UT-Austin”
  Lisa L. Moore is Archibald A. Hill Professor of English and Professor and Chair of the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Moore is the author of Sister Arts: The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes (Lambda Literary Award); Dangerous Intimacies: Toward a Sapphic History of the Novel; and the poetry chapbook 24 Hours of Men. Her creative-critical hybrid volume, How Lesbians Saved Poetry, is forthcoming from SUNY Press in 2026.
• Amy Reid Program Director, Freedom to Learn, PEN America
  “CENSORED: Where does Gender Studies Stand when Academic Freedom & Our Students’ Right to Education are Under Attack?”
  Amy Reid works with other PEN America staff and with colleagues from across the country to push back against government censorship in higher education. She is an ardent advocate for public education and the liberal arts. Before joining PEN America in August 2024, she was a professor of French and director of the Gender Studies Program at New College of Florida. In 2023-2024, she held the position of Chair of the Faculty and served, ex officio, on the New College Board of Trustees. 
• Michelle Lemelman Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and the Medical Director of TransCARE at the University of Chicago
  "Access Disrupted: Gender Affirming Care of Youth in Chicagoland"
  Nominated as a Bucksbaum-Siegler Institute Associate Junior Faculty Scholar, Michelle Lemelman is a renowned expert in pediatric endocrinology and is dedicated to advancing research on the impact of effective physician-patient communication on clinical care.
   

3:45-5:15pm | Panel 4: Institutionalization and its Discontents

Moderated by Cathy Cohen, D. Gale Johnson Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity

What factors have shaped the (re)formation of centers, departments, and institutes over the past c. 50 years? Panelists will consider the affordances and limitations of institutionalization, including the ways in which administrative structures give visibility to fields of research and avenues of inquiry, also at the risk of constraining or reifying them.

• Margot Kotler Senior Associate Director, Barnard Center for Research on Women
  “Holding On: Feminist Knowledge and the Politics of Institutional Survival”
  Margot Kotler is Senior Associate Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women and affiliated faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College. Her research examines feminist life writing, queer embodiment, and the politics of affect in modernist literature, with current work extending these questions to feminist archives and the institutional conditions of knowledge production. At BCRW, she organizes the Scholar and Feminist Conference and works across programming, publications, and research groups to develop initiatives that link feminist scholarship to social change. She received her Ph.D. in English from the Graduate Center, CUNY, in 2024, and has taught writing, literature, and gender studies at Dartmouth College and Queens College, CUNY.
• Heather K. Love Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania
  “When You Wish Upon a Star System: Queer Studies Now”  
  Heather Love is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard University Press) and Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory (University of Chicago Press). She also edited a special issue of GLQ on Gayle Rubin (“Rethinking Sex”) and co-edited (with Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus) a special issue of Representations ("Description Across Disciplines"). In 2023, she published Literary Studies and Human Flourishing, co-edited with James F. English (Oxford University Press). Love has written on topics including comparative social stigma, compulsory happiness, transgender fiction, spinster aesthetics, and reading methods in literary studies. She is currently working on a new project ("To Be Real,” forthcoming at University of Chicago Press), which addresses the uses of the personal in queer criticism. 
• Haylee Harrell Assistant Professor of Black Studies, University of Houston
  “In-Not-Of: Black-Queer-Feminist Tensions with the University”
  Haylee Harrell (they/them) is an Assistant Professor of Black Studies in the Department of English at the University of Houston where they are also affiliated with the departments of African American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, as well as the Media and Moving Image Program. They hold a Ph.D. in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Emory University and their research emerges at the intersections of black feminist theory, critical black studies, gender and sexuality studies, and 20th-21st African American and Interracial Literatures.

* UChicago alumni

The CSGS 30th Anniversary Symposium Planning Committee: Tate Brazas (CSGS), Daisy Delogu (Romance Languages and Literatures), Jonathan Flatley (English), Rochona Majumdar (South Asian Languages and Civilizations/Cinema and Media Studies), Kaneesha Parsard (English), Red Vaughan Tremmel (Gender and Sexuality Studies), and Gabriel Winant (History).

Please contact tbrazas@uchicago.edu if you require any accommodations to enable your full participation.
 

Co-sponsors: 

• Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture

• Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT)

• Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization (CEGU) 

• Committee on Southern Asian Studies (COSAS)

• Department of Comparative Human Development

• Department of English Language and Literature

• Department of South Asian Languages & Civilizations

• Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity (RDI)

• Department of Romance Languages and Literatures

• France Chicago Center

• Franke Institute for the Humanities

• Freshwater: A Chicago Caribbean Studies Incubator

• Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion

• Pozen Family Center for Human Rights

• with funding support from the Chicago Forum’s Zell Speaker and Event Series and Zell Family Foundation