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Queer Theories Graduate Symposium

Friday, April 10th

Center for British & Irish Studies (5th floor Norlin Library, M549)

11:15am - 2:05pm Graduate student Panels

2:15pm - 3:45pm Keynote Speaker, Anthony Petro

Join WGST and Queer & Trans Studies for this year’s Queer Theories Graduate Symposium, where graduate students will present on their original work! Following panel presentations, Keynote Speaker, Anthony Petro will give a talk on Queer Art in the Age of Culture Wars. Please see below for a detailed schedule. Refreshments will be served. 

Ìý11:15-12:05ÌýBeyond the Present: Queer Futurity across Art, Faith, and Abolition

• Silvia Ibsen (Gender & Sexuality Studies)
• William Holt III (Art & Art History)
• Kevin White (English)
• Courtney Pierce (Art & Art History)

12:15-1:05ÌýUnruly Bodies: Gender, Desire, and the Limits of Normativity

• Vianney Aguilar (Theatre)
• Heidi Judd (Communication)
• Oisín Sheerin (Media Research and Practice)

1:15-2:05ÌýNowhere and Here: Queer Geographies of Belonging, Loss, and Utopia

• Sophia Valdez (Spanish)
• Alexander Shotin (Russian)
• Logan Wintsch (Rural Community Health)
• Marissa Sher (Creative Writing)

2:15-3:45pm Keynote Speaker: Anthony Petro

Playing Sacred: Queer Art in the Age of Culture Wars

Why did queer art become so central to U.S. culture wars battles in the 1980s and 1990s? How did conservatives come to understand this work as obscene and sacrilegious? And how were queer artists drawing upon religious iconography–and to what ends? This talk takes us to the heart of culture wars battles over sexuality, religion, art, and interpretation. Drawing on feminist and queer theories of form and play, it rereads this much maligned archive of queer art to suggest the persistence and power of queer commitments both to religious critique and to religious worldmaking. 

Anthony Petro is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame, where he is also an affiliate faculty member in Gender Studies. He teaches courses in U.S. religious history, feminist and queer studies, the long 1980s, and visual culture. He is the author of two books, Provoking Religion: Sex, Art, and the Culture Wars (Oxford University Press, 2025) and After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion (Oxford University Press, 2015). Petro is currently working on a queer biography of the writer Kathryn Hulme.