Queer Localities: a two-day international conference
Birkbeck, University of London
30 November – 1 December 2017
You can also download the conference programme here.
Click here for Conference Registration.
Subject to change!
Please note that this schedule is subject to change due to external circumstances beyond our control.
Invitation to Keynote Lecture:
You are warmly invited to Chris Waters’ public lecture at the ‘Queer Lives Past and Present: Interrogating the Legal’ conference, sister to the Queer Localities conference. Chris’s talk will bridge the two events.
Chris Waters, ‘Turing in Context: Sexual Offences in Cheshire in the 1950s’
Wednesday 29th November, 6.00pm, Clore Lecture Theatre, Birkbeck College, Torrington Square, London WC1E. Free, no need to book.
Queer Localities: an international Conference
Programme, Day One
Queer Localities: an international Conference
Programme, Day Two
Speaker Biographies
| Name | Title of contribution | Biography |
| Beth Asbury | “Out in Oxford”, Museums, Public History, Community Curation | Beth Asbury works for the Pitt Rivers Museum, an anthropology and world archaeology museum at the University of Oxford (www.prm.ox.ac.uk) She was the project manager of Out in Oxford: www.glam.ox.ac.uk/outinoxford. @Pitt_Rivers #OutInOxford #QueerPitt |
| Anne Balay | “Queer Circulations: Gay, Trans and Black Truck Drivers Tell Stories of Independence and of State Surveillance.” | Anne Balay teaches at Haverford College, where she is the coordinator of Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her first book, Steel Closets: Voices of Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Steelworkers, was published in 2014. Balay has worked as a car mechanic and an over-the-road trucker. Her next book, due out in 2018, is an ethnography of gay, trans, and black truckers, and describes the contemporary experience of these working-class queers. |
| Ross Brooks | Beyond Brideshead: The Homoerotics of 1930s Oxford in the Photographs of Cyril Arapoff (1898-1976) | Ross Brooks is a Wellcome Trust-funded doctoral student at Oxford Brookes University. His thesis, Evolution’s Closet: The New Biology and Homosexuality in Britain, 1900-1976, explores the engagement of leading British biologists with changing concepts of sexuality wrought by new discoveries in genetics and endocrinology. Ross’s paper on Cyril Arapoff, however, is not connected with his doctorate. It originates with a local LGBT guide he wrote and self-published in 2006 entitled Queer Oxford. Ross’s interest in local queer history continues apace and is currently being channeled into a new website (queeroxford.info) showcasing over six centuries of LGBT history in the city Oscar Wilde called “the capital of romance.” twitter address @rossb_oxford |
| Alan Butler | “Safe Spaces and Claimed Places: An Exploration of LGBT Representation In Sites on a Local Level” | Alan Butler has recently completed his AHRC funded collaborative PhD called “Performing LGBT Pride in Plymouth 1950 -2012” with Plymouth University. The project has involved the formation of and a specific LGBT history accession for the Plymouth and West Devon Record Office which sits alongside the Plymouth LGBT Community Archive. The archive comprises of over forty five oral history interviews along with memorabilia pertaining to the performance of LGBT identity in the city over a sixty-year period. Alan has spoken about his work with the archive at a number of national conferences, including the yearly LGBT archives conference at the London Metropolitan Archive, while, on a local level, taking the materials into schools and employers in the Plymouth area. |
| Rachel Hope Cleves | A “Queer Collection”: The English Colony in Florence in the 1920s and 1930s. | Rachel Hope Cleves is Professor of History at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia, and author of Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America (2014). She can be followed on twitter @RachelCleves. |
| Peter Edelberg | ‘The harmful assumption of homophobia in the provinces’ | Peter Edelberg is a historian, PhD, and external lecturer at the Saxo Institute at the University of Copenhagen. He has written on Danish LGBT history in the anthologies ‘Queer Cities / Queer Cultures’, eds. Matt Cook and Jennifer Evans (2014) and ‘Sexual Revolution’, eds. Gert Hekma and Alain Giami (2014). He is currently preparing a transnational project on the LGBT history of Scandinavia in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.” |
| Orla Egan | “QUEER REPUBLIC OF CORK: The development of Cork’s LGBT Community and of the Cork LGBT Archive” | Orla Egan is the creator and curator of the Cork LGBT Archive and author of Queer Republic of Cork http://www.onstream.ie/books/queer_republic.htm. She has a long history of LGBT activism and work in the community development, education, equality and social justice fields. She teaches part-time in Women’s Studies, Digital Humanities and Social Studies in UCC.
Queer Republic of Cork, Cork’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Communities, 1970s-1990s, published 2016 www.onstream.ie/books/queer_republic.htm http://corklgbtarchive.com/ https://www.facebook.com/CorkLGBTArchive/ Twitter: @OrlaEgan1 @CorkLGBThistory https://orlaegan.wordpress.com/ |
| Susan Ferentinos | “Main Street USA: Incorporating Queer Experiences into Local History Venues” | Susan Ferentinos is a public history researcher, writer, and consultant based in the United States Midwest. She is the author of Interpreting LGBT History at Museums and Historic Sites (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), which won the 2016 National Council on Public History Book Award. Currently, she is engaged with numerous projects related to the U.S. National Park Service LGBTQ Heritage Initiative. She holds a PhD in U.S. History and a Masters of Library Science, both from Indiana University. |
| Craig Griffiths | International Travel in the 1970s and the making of the ‘gay world’. | Craig Griffiths is a Lecturer in Modern History at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is currently finishing a manuscript on gay politics in 1970s West Germany, provisionally entitled The Ambivalence of Gay Liberation. He tweets from @ecocraig. |
| Simon Harding
|
Generalisations and Assumptions versus the lived experience of LGBT people in medium sized cities | Simon Harding is Associate Professor in Criminology at University of West London. He has degrees in Geography, Planning, Criminology and Youth Justice. His research experience covers Policing, Gangs, group offending, Hate Crime, Street Violence, urban landscapes, and sexuality. He has a wide range of practitioner and professional experience in crime and community safety as both a public servant and civil servant. Simon was Home Office Regional Crime Advisor (London) before becoming Assistant Director of Community Safety at Lambeth council. Simon is also a trainer in hate crime and diversity, and was consultant trainer at the Crime Academy, MPS Police Training College, Hendon for ten years. He is an Independent Advisor on hate crime and diversity to the MPS Commissioner, a position held since 1999. |
| Dominic Janes | ‘“Even in Arcadia, there am I”: The town of Rye in Sussex and the queering of the English idyll’ | Dominic Janes is Professor of Modern History at Keele University. He is a cultural historian specialising in studies of sexuality and visual culture in Britain since the eighteenth century. His most recent book is ‘Oscar Wilde Prefigured: Queer Fashioning and British Caricature, 1750-1900’ (University of Chicago Press, 2016). |
| Rebecca Jennings | ‘A thousand acres of red fertile earth’: The rural and the urban in 1970s visions of lesbian nation | Rebecca Jennings is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of History at University College, London (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/history/people/academic-staff/rebecca-jennings). Her research focuses on modern British and Australian lesbian history and she is the author of Tomboys and Bachelor Girls: A Lesbian History of Post-war Britain (Manchester University Press, 2007) and Unnamed Desires: A Sydney Lesbian History (Monash University Publishing, 2015). |
| Surat-Shaan Knan | Rainbow Pilgrims: The Rites and Passages of LGBTQI Migrants in Britain
|
Presenter profile: Surat-Shaan Knan is an LGBTQI heritage manager, diversity consultant, international campaigner. He is a member of the Stonewall Trans Advisory Group, GIRES and the Trans Organisations Network Worker for the LGBT Consortium. He works for the UK charity Liberal Judaism and is the founder of the landmark oral history projects Rainbow Jews, Twilight People and most recently Rainbow Pilgrims: The Rites and Passages of LGBTQI migrants in the UK. www.rainbowjews.com www.twilightpeople.com www.rainbowpilgrims.com @rainbowpilgrims |
| Searle Kochberg and Margaret Greenfields | How the local Jewish Liberal LGBTQ+ communities in London reconstruct and renew their own relationship to ritual and belief. | Searle Kochberg is a maker and writer on cinema and other performing arts. He is currently pursuing a Practice PhD at the University of Portsmouth in auto-ethnographic Film and Jewish Gay London, entitled My Jewish London. He teaches at the same institution. His areas of research are film studies, directing and script (fiction and nonfiction).
Margaret Greenfields is currently the Professor of Social Policy and Community Engagement (2013-present). She is the Director of the Institute of Diversity Research, Inclusivity, Communities and Society (IDRICS) at Buckinghamshire New University. For more info see http://bucks.ac.uk/research/research_institutes/idrics/ http://bucks.ac.uk/whoswho/profile/margaret_greenfields |
| Valerie Korinek
|
“The Prairies– Coming Out Strong”: Western Canadian Queer Communities, 1969-1985 | Valerie J. Korinek is Professor of Modern Canadian History at the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada. She is the author of Prairie Fairies: A History of Queer Communities and People in Western Canada, 1930-1985 which is forthcoming from the University of Toronto Press in Spring/Summer 2018. An expert in sexualities histories, gender and culture, she publishes in the areas of feminist publishing and periodicals, food studies, sexuality, and western Canada. |
| Daryl Leeworthy | Gay Boyo Nights? Activism and Nightlife in South Wales, 1967-c.1985. | Daryl Leeworthy teaches history in the Department for Adult and Continuing Education at Swansea University. His research focuses on the social and labour history of South Wales. He blogs at www.historyonthedole.wordpress.com. |
| Gareth Longstaff | The North South Divide? Examining Queer Intersections between Newcastle upon Tyne and London | Gareth Longstaff is a lecturer in media and cultural studies at Newcastle University. Both his teaching and research interests are primarily concerned with queer sexuality, discourses of self-representation, pornography and celebrity. Gareth works at the intersection of how these are connected to other dimensions of queer, cultural, philosophical, mediated and social life. |
| Jenny Marsden
|
Daughter of District Six: The Kewpie photographic collection. | Jenny Marsden is an archivist based in South Africa. She is currently working as a project archivist for the Gay and Lesbian Memory in Action archive and the University of Johannesburg. Her previous experience includes work on the Hall Carpenter Oral History collection at the British Library. |
| Cheryl Morgan and Julian Warren | Working with The City: an LGBT+ History Partnership. | Cheryl Morgan (www.cheryl-morgan.com) is a co-chair of OutStories Bristol (outstoriesbristol.org.uk). She writes and speaks regularly about trans history, and can be found on Twitter as @CherylMorgan
Julian Warren has worked as an archivist at Bristol Archives since 2010, where he has been City Archivist since 2014. This summer he moves to the University of Bristol Theatre Collection to take up the post of Keeper: Digital and Live Art Archives. As a Bristol City Council officer, he has worked in partnership with regional history society Outstories since 2012 , assisting Outstories in the development of their archive and exhibitions projects. Twitter: @bristolarchives facebook.com/bristolarchives |
| Zhenzhong Mu | Queer Opera Fans’ Parties: “Sisterhood”, Politics, and Eroticism in Rural Southern China. | Zhenzhong Mu is a PhD candidate in the Lau China Institute at King’s College London. He works on queer culture, with a focus on the critique of universal gayness and progressivist modernity. His doctoral work examines Chinese tongzhi’s consumption and instrumentalisation of traditional yue opera in relation to the formation of their agency. |
| Louise Pawley | The politics and pleasure of Brighton beach | After completing an MA in Contemporary History at the University of Sussex, Louise Pawley recently finished a graduate internship with University of Sussex Special Collections and now works at The Keep archive centre. She is interested in Brighton’s LGBTQ history and the role of the archive in queer history, which was the subject of her MA dissertation. Louise tweets from @LouisePawley |
| Mark Peart | Sodom Island and Samuel Jones: Pandaemonium and sodomitical social order on Norfolk Island,1832-1846 | Mark Peart is a current PhD candidate in English at The University of Sydney, Australia. His work is concerned with reading discourses of Sodom in the history of the convict colony of NSW. The colony was variously known as a ‘Sodom’, recalling nineteenth century notions of ‘Sodom’ as a civic locality of depraved social and sexual order. A component of this thesis is a creative manuscript of long form non-fiction poems drawn from these sodomy trial transcripts. His first book, “The Great Eastern”, a long form poem based on a Melbourne sodomy trial, was published by Rabbit in 2016. |
| Andrea Rottmann | Bars and Bedrooms: Public and Private Queer Spaces in Postwar Berlin. | Andrea Rottmann studies queer history in Berlin, Germany and Ann Arbor, MI, USA. Her dissertation is concerned with the everyday lives, subjectivites, and memory of queer Berliners in the decades after the Second World War. |
| George Townsend | Parson’s Pleasure, 1845-1992. | Having completed a Ba and MSt in English Literature at Oxford University, George currently works as the editor of the arts magazine, Eyot, and as an independent researcher specialising in the history of Oxford’s bathing places and queer oral history. He has done work in association with the LGBTQ Special Interest Group of the Oral History Society, and with Tales of Our City, an LGBT+ community oral history project in Oxford. |
| Alva Traebert | Great Expectations: Migrating to Edinburgh. | Alva Traebert is a Gender Historian and Feminist Sociologist. She is currently writing her PhD thesis in Sociology examining Queer Identities in Scotland, and working as a research associate in LGBTQ Public Health at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Dortmund, Germany. Twitter: @AlvaKatharina |
| Jude Woods | Queerly does it: LGBTQ+ participation, methodology and influence. | Jude Woods combines visual arts and curatorial practice with a long-term focus on intersectionality and activism; sustaining a portfolio of community development posts and freelance projects spanning community arts, writing, research, training and consultation. They hold an MA in Fine Art (Contemporary Practice) from Leeds Beckett University, contributed an illustrated short story to The Alphabet Club Anthology Book curated by Jamie Fletcher (2016) and contributed to Reflections on Female and Trans* Masculinities and Other Queer Crossings, co-edited with Nina Kane (2017). |
Updated 27 November 2017