These lectures are sponsored by the Herbert P. Lefler fund.
Fall 2024 Lefler Lecture
Tuesday, October 15, 5:15 pm
Dr. Jennifer Dominique Jones, Associate Professor in History and Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Michigan
Title: An Ambivalent History: Blackness and Homosexuality in the Post-World War II Political Imaginary
In the summer of 1976, Maynard Jackson, the first Black mayor of Atlanta, found himself embroiled in controversy when he formally recognized the city’s Gay Pride Celebration. While this moment reflected particular political faultlines in the metropolitan landscape among Evangelical Protestants, corporate business interests, Black political elites and the city’s gay and lesbian community, it also illustrates how binaries of race and sexuality continued to be mutually referential during the second half of the twentieth century, in sometimes surprising ways. Using this moment of tension as an entry point, this talk returns to a familiar history — the history of the Post-War Black Freedom Struggle and opposition to it — illuminating one genealogy for the simultaneous distancing and tethering of “Blackness” and “Homosexuality” in American political discourse. Furthermore, the talk will consider how ambivalence might function as a generative affect in historical narratives and historical analysis.
Dr. Jones is an Associate Professor of History and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan. Her areas of research and teaching expertise are Black Queer History, Black Feminist History, African American History after 1877, with a focus on politics and social life and the History of Gender and Sexuality in the United States in the Twentieth Century with a focus on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ+) politics and community life. She is the author of Ambivalent Affinities: A Political History of Blackness and Homosexuality After World War II (University of North Carolina Press, 2023). Ambivalent Affinities was a finalist for the 2024 LGBTQ+ Studies Prize from the Lambda Literary Foundation (for the best academic book in LGBTQ+ Studies) and received an honorable mention for the 2024 James A. Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians (for the best book in the history of race relations).
Winter 2025 Lefler Lecture
Tuesday, February 18, 5:15 pm
Dr. John Soluri, Associate Professor of History, Carnegie Mellon
Title: Creatures of Fashion: Animals and the Transformation of Patagonia, 1800s-2000s
Professor Soluri’s research and teaching explore the relationship between social and environmental change in Latin America. His book, Creatures of Fashion: Animals, Global Markets, and the Transformation of Patagonia (Spring 2024) examines how the commodification of wild and domesticated animals for textiles transformed Patagonia.
He is currently working with three graduate students: Francisco Javier Bonilla who is writing his dissertation on the history of water infrastructure in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Panama City; Matthew Turetsky who is researching quinoa and agrodiversity in highland Perú; and Zach Crouch who is interested in the Mexican Revolution’s transnational influences on struggles for land in the Americas.
Spring 2025 Lefler Lecture
Tuesday, May 6, 5:15 pm
Dr. Katharine Gerbner, Associate Professor of History, University of Minnesota
Title: TBD
Dr. Gerbner teaches courses on Atlantic History, History of Religions, Magic & Medicine, and The Early Modern Archive. Her research explores the religious dimensions of race, authority, and freedom in early America, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic world. Dr. Gerbner’s first book, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World, shows how debates between slave-owners, black Christians, and missionaries transformed the practice of Protestantism and the language of race.
Questions? Contact Prof. Victoria Morse, History Department Chair
“History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.”
— James Baldwin, “The White Man’s Guilt,” Ebony Magazine, August 1965