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qUCL ONLINE: Trans Histories, for LGBTQ History Month
26 February 2021, 12:00 pm–1:30 pm
qUCL is pleased to welcome Dr Ezra Horbury, Dr. Xine Yao and UCL BASc student Aleks Jagielski to discuss different aspects of trans histories.
Event Information
Open to
- UCL staff | UCL students
Availability
- Yes
Organiser
-
qUCL
Aleks Jagielski: I will be discussing my dissertation, which is about the poetry of the Polish modernist writer Piotr Włast, and reclaiming him as trans. My research is focused on deconstructing transphobic discourses around Włast present in Polish literary scholarship, and studying how a trans perspective sheds new light on his poetry.
Dr Ezra Horbury: I will be discussing 'Pre-Modern Transphobia', which takes an intersectional and historicist approach to what we might consider transphobic antecedents. I'll discuss subjects such as the anti-Semitic myth of menstruating Jewish men, supposed cross-dressing popes, and the evolution of 'monstrous hermaphrodites' in early bioknowledge.
Dr. Xine Yao: I will be presenting from an essay I've written entitled "Gender Variance Before Trans" from the forthcoming Cambridge History of Queer American Literature which foregrounds trans and queer of colour critique as a way of reading literature before mid twentieth century.
This is an internal event for UCL staff and students only. Please register using your UCL email. The event will run on Zoom. The link and passcode will be provided via email on the day of the event. Please register to attend at https://qucl-transhistories.eventbrite.co.uk
This event is organised by qUCL, which is part of the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies.
About the Speakers
Aleks Jagielski
A final-year student in the Arts and Sciences department at University College London. Supervised by Dr. Xine Yao, Aleks’s dissertation is concerned with trans perspectives in the poetry of the Polish modernist Piotr Włast, and deconstructing transphobic discourses around him.
Dr Ezra Horbury
A British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow in English at University College London. Their current project presents the first investigation into biblical paratexts in the early modern period, and they work on theology, gender, and sexuality more broadly. Their first book Prodigality in Early Modern Drama was published with Boydell and Brewer in 2019 and they have recently published articles in Shakespeare Quarterly, Transgender Studies Quarterly, and Harvard Theological Review.
More about Dr Ezra HorburyDr. Xine Yao
Lecturer in American Literature to 1900 at University College London. Her first book is Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America (Duke University Press, 2021). Her honours include the American Studies Association’s Yasuo Sakakibara Essay Prize and her research has been supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She is a BBC Radio 3/AHRC New Generation Thinker and the co-host of PhDivas Podcast.
More about Dr. Xine Yao