WGST news

Queer Theories Graduate Symposium

Molly Beck — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 19:37:07 +0000

Queer Theories Graduate Symposium Molly Beck Thu, 04/02/2026 - 13:37

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.

11:15-12:05 Beyond 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)

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

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

1:15-2:05 Nowhere 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.

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Ericka Huggins and Gayle Dickson (Asali) in Conversation

Molly Beck — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 17:30:42 +0000

Ericka Huggins and Gayle Dickson (Asali) in Conversation Molly Beck Fri, 02/20/2026 - 10:30

On February 12, 2026, the Department of Women's and Gender Studies co-hosted a conversation with Ericka Huggins and Gayle Dickson (Asali), organized by Kristie Soares, Cheryl Higashida, and Maisam Alomar. The event drew a full room of students, faculty, and community members, including students enrolled in the courses "Beyond Prisons: Reform, Resistance, and Abolition," "Black Feminist and Womanist Theories," and "U.S. Women Writers."

The conversation spanned a rich range of topics, including the vital role of women in the Black Panther Party, the Party's internationalist solidarities and abolitionist commitments, and the enduring power of media and storytelling as tools of resistance and liberation.

The event was co-hosted by the Center for African and African American Studies, the Departments of History, English, Ethnic Studies, and Women's and Gender Studies, and the Center for Humanities & the Arts.

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Professor Samira Mehta Interviewed About PBS Documentary

Molly Beck — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 17:01:56 +0000

Professor Samira Mehta Interviewed About PBS Documentary Molly Beck Fri, 02/20/2026 - 10:01

Earlier this month, the first episode of PBS's Black and Jewish America: An Interwoven History premiered, with the final episode of this 4 part docuseries premiering on 2/16. Professor Samira Mehta, Women & Gender Studies Associate Professor and Director of the Program in Jewish Studies, is featured in the PBS docuseries exploring the history behind black and Jewish Americans. She was also an academic consultant for the series. Watch the series here!

To promote the docuseries and explain how the series explores the intertwined narratives of Black and Jewish communities and the moments that connect them, Mehta was interviewed by 9News Denver. Watch it here!

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Julie Carr Publishes New Book Titled The Garden

Eileen Tabora — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 17:54:41 +0000

Julie Carr Publishes New Book Titled The Garden Eileen Tabora Tue, 02/17/2026 - 10:54

About the author: Julie Carr is a Professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder in the Department of English where she teaches courses in poetry and poetics from the eighteenth century to the present, and the chair of the Women and Gender studies department. A former dancer, she now collaborates regularly with dance-artist K.J. Holmes, and has created collaborative works with many other artists, dancers, and filmmakers. With Tim Roberts she helps run Counterpath, an independent literary press and a bookstore/gallery/performance space/community garden in Denver. Julie Carr's new book, The Garden, was published by Essay Press (US) and Pamenar Press (UK) in the fall of 2025.

About the book: The Garden, book one of the trilogy Overflow, dedicates itself to two seminal figures in Carr’s life: the painter Tony Robbin, who paints four-dimensional space, and the theoretical physicist, feminist, and philosopher, Karen River Barad.

Through a spirited series of fractured and interwoven narratives, The Garden reorients themes of time, war, Jewishness, memory, techno-biology, friendship, and grief. The garden, as a foundational site of fallness, separation, and loss, is also where we discover desire, becoming, and poiesis. This work of essay-auto-fiction embraces the porous vulnerability of beings appearing in the overflow, the violence and rapture of the ongoing “now.” A city is invaded as a lost child is found, a swastika reanimates itself across the internet, a bullet grazes a girl in parking lot, a Moroccan Jewish grandmother witnesses Operation Torch from a Casablanca rooftop, a boy raised in Yokohama in the aftermath of the atomic blasts grows up to father a baby with a hole in his heart: these moments that resound backwards and at the same time shoot forwards, this “oftening, over-and-overing, and aftering,” is what we call history.

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Dr. Jianmin Shao’s new article “The geobiopolitics of trans medicine: Kinship, recalibrated care, and difference-making amid China-US tensions” published in American Ethnologist

Eileen Tabora — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 16:10:37 +0000

Dr. Jianmin Shao’s new article “The geobiopolitics of trans medicine: Kinship, recalibrated care, and difference-making amid China-US tensions” published in American Ethnologist Eileen Tabora Mon, 02/09/2026 - 09:10

Dr. Jianmin Shao’s article “The geobiopolitics of trans medicine: Kinship, recalibrated care, and difference-making amid China-US tensions” has recently been published in American Ethnologist. A flagship journal in social and cultural anthropology, American Ethnologist features scholarship that combines ethnographic specificity with original theoretical thinking, conveying the relevance of the ethnographic imagination to the contemporary world.

In her editorial note, the journal’s Editor, Dr. Susanna Trnka, highlights Shao’s “fine-grained ethnography in a [Chinese] trans medical care clinic” and notes that “understanding the biopolitics of trans medicine thus requires, Shao argues, a geobiopolitical framing.” Read the article here.

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Professor Samira Mehta Consults On and Appears in the PBS Documentary Black and Jewish America: An Interwoven History

Eileen Tabora — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 18:11:02 +0000

Professor Samira Mehta Consults On and Appears in the PBS Documentary Black and Jewish America: An Interwoven History Eileen Tabora Tue, 02/03/2026 - 11:11

Professor Samira Mehta, Women & Gender Studies Associate Professor and Director of the Program in Jewish Studies, is featured in a new PBS docuseries exploring the history behind black and Jewish Americans. She was also an academic consultant for the series.

Black and Jewish America: An Interwoven History is a four-part series tracing the rich, complex relationship between Black and Jewish Americans — defined by solidarity and strained by division. Drawn together by racism and antisemitism, they forged civic and cultural bonds, especially during the civil rights era. The series explores both the challenges and enduring promise of that alliance.

The first episode airs today. Watch it here!

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Dr. Kristie Soares Receives Awards for Podcast Episode

Danny Ackley — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 20:07:25 +0000

Dr. Kristie Soares Receives Awards for Podcast Episode Danny Ackley Fri, 10/31/2025 - 14:07

Professor Kristie Soares’ podcast, Soundscapes NYC, has won the Bronze Award for Best Indie Podcast and the Listener’s Choice Award for Best Indie Podcast at the 2025 Signal Awards! The recognized episode, “Lost Women of Disco,” features an interview with PhDJ Lulu Le Vay, who explores the often-untold stories of women in dance music culture. From Régine Zylberberg's visionary work in creating the modern discotheque in 1950s Paris to Sharon White's trailblazing presence at New York's legendary venues in the 1970s, female DJs have always shaped dance floors worldwide.

Listen to the episode and learn more about the Signal Awards here.

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Dr. Emmanuel David Receives Award from Western History Association

Danny Ackley — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 15:19:40 +0000

Dr. Emmanuel David Receives Award from Western History Association Danny Ackley Wed, 10/15/2025 - 09:19

Dr. Emmanuel David and Dr. Yumi Roth's Article, "Playing Filipino: Racial Display, Resistance, and the Filipino Rough Riders in Buffalo Bill's Wild West," has been selected for the 2025 Vicki L. Ruiz Award for the best article on race in the North American West from the Western History Association! The Ruiz Committee noted, “Emmanuel David and Yumi Janairo Roth's Playing Filipino provides an insightful contribution to the history of the American West through a transnational analysis of United States imperialism during the late nineteenth century by examine the racialized roles of "playing Filipino" for American audiences. Through their creative use of sources and close readings of photographs, performances, and ephemera, the authors uncover histories of resistance among those marginalized in both the archive and history memory.”

Congratulations Dr. David and Dr. Roth!

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Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship - Fall 2025

Anonymous — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 19:42:14 +0000

Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship - Fall 2025 Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 08/21/2025 - 13:42

Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship - Fall 2025

The Department of Women and Gender Studies (WGST) welcomes applications for the Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship. For detailed program information, including eligibility requirements, the ��ӽ紫ý application process and timeline, and the application portal, please see: /postdoctoralaffairs/current-postdocs/chancellors-postdoctoral-fellowship. It is a competitive application process, first at the department level and then the university level.

To be considered as a ranked departmental nominee, materials (as listed below) need to be submitted to the Department of Women and Gender Studies by October 1, 2025. Please note this is one month ahead of the required university deadline of November 3.

Internal Application for the Department of Women and Gender Studies

Applicants should begin the process by contacting a possible mentor among the WGST faculty as soon as possible. If the WGST faculty member agrees to consider mentorship, the applicant should send them the follow materials by October 1:

Curriculum Vitae (CV)
Personal Statement (guidelines on the university's application page)
Writing Sample

The WGST faculty will review applicant dossiers in order to rank all applicants. We are only able to consider nomination of the very top-ranked candidates to the university review committee. Applicants will be advised of the department’s decision by October 17. The University of Colorado Boulder applicant deadline is November 3.

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Queer Chimerica: Speculation and the Futur(h)istory of Homopostsocialism

Kai Blake-Leibowitz — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 15:49:06 +0000

Queer Chimerica: Speculation and the Futur(h)istory of Homopostsocialism Kai Blake-Leibowitz Wed, 04/02/2025 - 09:49

Wednesday April 2nd, 2025
4pm - 5:30pm

Gates Woodruff Women's Studies Cottage, Reading Room - View map

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What’s the relationship between the discourse of queer fluidity and the rise of China since the 1990s? In what ways are queer history and futurity shaped by shifts in global postsocialist conditions? What stories are amplified or sidelined through the performativity and theatricality of queer politics? And what does it mean to write queerness as critical fabulations?

Blending archival work, ethnography, and cultural analysis with memoir, graphic arts, and science fiction, Dr. Shana Ye’s Queer Chimerica: A Speculative Auto/Ethnography unpacks the ways in which the transnational circulation of queer culture, politics, and institutions are structured through the antagonist interdependence of China and the US.

Dr. Shana Ye is an Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research areas include transnational feminism, queer theory, post/socialist studies, affect studies, and Sinophone science and technology studies.

This event is wheelchair accessible and will have automatic captioning available. Please contact WGST@Colorado.EDU for specific accommodation requests.

Co-sponsored by the LGBTQ Studies Program, the Departments of Women and Gender Studies, English, History, and the Pride Office.

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