LYCEUM LEGACY:

ISOM CENTER SPONSORED LECTURES FOR THE 2023-24 ACADEMIC YEAR

ACE Studies Lecture: K.J. Cerankowski

oCtober 19, 2023 • 4pm

The ACE Studies Lecture was established in the spring of 2022, to coincide with the Glitterary Festival, a queer literary conference. We subsequently moved this lecture to the fall, to coincide with asexuality week at the end of October. This year’s ACE Studies Lecture will be delivered by KJ Cerankowski. The title of his talk is "Wanting Nothing or Nothing Wanting? Asexuality, Desire, and the Matter of Absence."

KJ Cerankowski is an interdisciplinary scholar and writer with research interests in asexuality, trauma studies, queer theory, and transgender studies. He is the author of several articles, including the 2021 Symonds Prize-winning essay “The ‘End’ of Orgasm: The Erotics of Durational Pleasures,” published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality. His poetry and prose have been published in DIAGRAM, Pleiades, Entropy, and The Account, among others. He is the coeditor of Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives (Routledge 2014) and the author of Suture: Trauma and Trans Becoming (Punctum 2021).

Queer Studies Lecture: Joshua Whitehead

november 2, 2023 • 4pm

The Queer Studies Lecture was established in 2014, connected with the development of the queer studies emphasis in the Gender Studies minor. This fall’s Queer Studies lecture will be given by Joshua Whitehead. Whitehead’s lecture will also serve as the Center for Inclusion and Cross Cultural Engagement’s Native American Heritage Month Lecture.

Joshua Whitehead is a Two-Spirit, Oji-nêhiyaw member of Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1). He is currently a Ph.D. candidate, lecturer, and Killam scholar at the University of Calgary where he studies Indigenous literatures and cultures with a focus on gender and sexuality. He is the author of full-metal indigiqueer (Talonbooks 2017) which was shortlisted for the inaugural Indigenous Voices Award and the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry. He is also the author of Jonny Appleseed (Arsenal Pulp Press 2018) which was long listed for the Giller Prize, shortlisted for the Indigenous Voices Award, the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Amazon Canada

First Novel Award, the Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award, and won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction and the Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction. Whitehead is currently working on a third manuscript titled, Making Love with the Land, to be published with Knopf Canada, which explores the intersections of Indigeneity, queerness, and, most prominently, mental health through a nêhiyaw lens.

Howorth Lecture: Alex Ketchum

marCH 21, 2024 • 4pm

The oldest of the our annual lectures, the Lucy Somerville Howorth Lecture was established in 1991 to honor the life and career of Lucy Somerville Howorth, who was one of the first women to receive a juris doctor from UM. The endowed series brings distinguished speakers to the campus in the area of women’s and gender studies. During her life, she served the State of Mississippi in the executive and legislative branches, including being the first woman to represent Hinds County in the state legislature, and in the Federal Government. She was also heavily involved in the American Association of University Women, which endowed the lecture series in her honor. This year's Howorth Lecture will also serve as the keynote for the Isom Student Gender Conference.

Dr. Alex Ketchum is the Faculty Lecturer of the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies of McGill University. She is the author of two books: Engage in Public Scholarship!: A Guidebook on Feminist and Accessible Communication, and Ingredients for Revolution: A History of American Feminist Restaurants, Cafes, and Coffeehouses She is currently working on a book about the relationship between feminist ethics and AI. Her lecture will discuss how gender and sexuality research circulates in public forums, with her own work on feminist restaurants as a case study.

Trans Studies Lecture:

Kadji Amin apriL 11, 2024 • 4pm

The Trans Studies lecture was established in 2021, growing out of a Trans Summit hosted by the Division of Diversity and the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies in 2019. This year’s lecturer is Kadji Amin.

Kadji Amin is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. He is the author of Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History (Duke University Press, 2017), which won an Honorable Mention for the Alan Bray Memorial Award for best book in LGBT studies. Disturbing Attachments uses Genet to interrogate the desires that orient the field of Queer Studies. It demonstrates how contemporary queer attachments to non-normativity, sexual transgression, and political radicalism bear the stamp of recent gay American history. Ultimately, the book challenges scholars to disturb the desires of Queer Studies so that the field can reorient itself to an expanded range of geographic, historical, and racial subjects. This requires, first and foremost, challenging the idealizations of queer theory. Kadji is currently at work on two book projects: Trans Materialism without Gender Identity, an academic monograph that critiques gender identity as a midcentury psychiatric construct that has historically done transgender people more harm than good; and Brown Trans Misfit, an experimental memoir that upends the conventions of trans narratives.

The Isom Center's Lecture Series are sponsored by the College of Liberal Arts, the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, the Lucy Somerville Howorth Lecture Fund, the Isom Arts, Culture, and Community Development Fund and others.