Prof. Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet and Dr. Matthew Scully of the English Department have organized a CUSO event, Queer Theory and Literary Study, that will take place on Friday, March 31st at the University of Lausanne. Dr. Xine Yao (University College London) and Dr. Kevin Ohi (Boston College) will be the keynote speakers for the event.
Prof. Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet and Dr. Matthew Scully of the English Department have organized a CUSO event, Queer Theory and Literary Study, that will take place on Friday, March 31st at the University of Lausanne. Dr. Xine Yao (University College London) and Dr. Kevin Ohi (Boston College) will be the keynote speakers for the event. More information (and link to registration) can be found here. Both speakers have made, and continue to make, important contributions to the fields of queer theory and gender study.
Since its institutionalization by the academy—an institutional status that remains open to interrogation, critique, and subversion—queer theory has profoundly shaped the field of literary studies. This one-day event will invite doctoral students and other scholars to consider the place of queer theory in literary studies today within their respective fields. The event also aims to engage with some of the most recent scholarly developments, debates, and contributions in queer theory and queer literary study to (re)introduce doctoral students to the range of possibilities such conversations have inaugurated.
Dr. Xine Yao is Lecturer in American Literature in English to 1900 at University College London, where they also co-direct qUCL, a research initiative on sexual and gender diversity. In 2021, they published their first book, Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America (Duke University Press), which was awarded the Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award and was an Honorable Mention for the 2022 Arthur Miller First Book Prize (British Association of American Studies).
Dr. Kevin Ohi is Professor of English at Boston College, where he specializes in queer theory, aestheticism and decadence, and literary theory. He’s the author of four monographs: Innocence and Rapture: The Erotic Child in Pater, Wilde, James and Nabokov (Palgrave, 2005), Henry James and the Queerness of Style (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), Dead Letters Sent: Queer Literary Transmission (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), and Inceptions: Literary Beginnings and Contingencies of Form (Fordham University Press, 2021). He has also received numerous awards for his scholarship, including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2013-2014).
(The event will take place in English.)