Roxane Gay Named as a Presidential Visiting Fellow in Spring 2019

Prominent writer Roxane Gay has been selected as a Presidential Visiting Fellow for the spring term and will join Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies. She is a distinguished journalist and author on feminism, race, gender, and their intersections, having authored the books: Ayiti, An Untamed State, the New York Times bestselling Bad Feminist, the nationally bestselling Difficult Women and the New York Times bestselling Hunger. She will teach a spring semester undergraduate course on Writing Trauma and appear at two events open to the community on Feb 5 and Mar 5.

Portrait of Otelia Cromwell

WGSS is proud to host a newly commissioned portrait of Otelia Cromwell in room 309 of W.L. Harkness.

Otelia Cromwell (1874-1972) was born and raised in Washington, D.C. After graduating from high school, Otelia taught in the D.C. public schools while taking college courses at Howard University. In 1897 she transferred to Smith College. She graduated with a B.A. in 1900, becoming the College’s first African American graduate. In 1910, she earned her M.A. in English from Columbia University. In 1926, Otelia Cromwell became the first African American woman to earn a Yale Ph.D., and the fourth African American woman to earn a Ph.D. in this country. Her dissertation, Thomas Heywood, Dramatist: A Study in Elizabethan Drama of Everyday Life, was published by the Yale University Press in 1928...
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James R. Brudner '83 Memorial Prize and Lecture

LGBT Studies is pleased to announce that Bill T. Jones has been awarded the 2018-19 James Brudner Memorial Prize in LGBT Studies. Jones, a multi-talented artist, choreographer, dancer, theater director and writer, will deliver the Brudner Prize lecture at Yale on Tuesday, February 19th at 4:30 p.m. at the Whitney Humanities Center. Bill T. Jones has received major honors ranging from the Human Rights Campaign’s 2016 Visibility Award, 2013 National Medal of Arts to a 1994 MacArthur “Genius” Award and Kennedy Center Honors in 2010. Mr. Jones was honored with the 2014 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, recognized as Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 2010, inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2009 and named “An Irreplaceable Dance Treasure” by the Dance Heritage Coalition in 2000. His ventures into Broadway theater resulted in a 2010 Tony Award for Best Choreography in the critically acclaimed FELA!, the musical co-conceived, co-written, directed and choreographed by Mr. Jones. He also earned a 2007 Tony Award for Best Choreography in Spring Awakening as well as an Obie Award for the show’s 2006 off-Broadway run. His choreography for the off-Broadway production of The Seven earned him a 2006 Lucille Lortel Award. 

Kinship in Times of Suspicious Citizenship

WGSS Lecture Series, 2018–2019

This lecture series explores the relationship between political life and kinship. The series attends to processes and practices of kinning in relation to politics and governance, bureaucracy and neoliberalism, borders, borderlands, and the production of internal and external “enemies,” as well as for thinking through genders and sexualities. Presenters engage recurring questions about meanings and representations of belonging, essentially, what kinship means to people, while also bringing these very questions into meaningful conversation with the practices through which political, juridical, and economic formations—from the nation-state to corporate and media networks—have become invested in categorizing and regulating relations of kinship and reproduction.  In considering how intimacy is negotiated with and against institutional investments, the lectures probe how more and more practices and idioms of citizenship are being rendered suspect.

Call for Proposals
Sarah Pettit Doctoral Fellowship in LGBT Studies - Queer Studies and Religion

2019 Doctoral Dissertation Workshop with Kathryn Lofton and Linn Tonstad
May 13-17, 2019 at Yale University

Yale LGBT Studies is pleased to announce that the Sarah Pettit Doctoral Fellowship in Lesbian Studies at Yale University is welcoming applications for a biennial dissertation-writing workshop for a cohort of doctoral fellows. The 2019 Yale Pettit Doctoral Fellowship Workshop will take place May 13-17, 2019 in New Haven, CT and will focus on scholarship at the intersection of queer studies, LGBT studies, and religious studies.

Fellows will convene for a three-day intensive workshop at Yale University where they will present and engage with each other’s work. They will meet with and receive feedback from the workshop’s two faculty mentors, Professors Kathryn Lofton and Linn Tonstad...
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