Over the reading break, Jennifer Evans gave two invited lectures in the UK, part of LGBTQ History Month. Drawing on her recent book, The Queer Art of History: Queer Kinship After Fascism (Duke UP, 2023), she talked about the power and potency of trans-inclusive queer kinships in bridging differences and mobilizing for change. At the University of Southampton, the talk entitled “Why We Need Kinship Now More Than Ever” was this year’s Stonewall Lecture. Past lecturers have included George Chauncey, Dagmar Herzog, and Howard Chiang.
At Mansfield College, University of Oxford, Evans’s lecture “On Kinship” was the First Inaugural Jonathan Cooper Lecture, named in honour of the human rights lawyer who lobbied for LGBTQ+ rights across the globe. Earlier in the day, Evans facilitated a workshop with Oxford and area graduate students on the emotional and affective ties fostered by photography and material culture, building a collage out of images students brought with them alongside Polaroid prints made in the moment. Each photograph told the story of the students’s coming to their work and together with the printed and found items helped strengthen their connections to the past and to each other as they navigate the world of queer and trans history together.